Society of Jewellery Historians Lecture
23rd May
Estelle Ottenwelter
Insight into early medieval elite jewellery from Bohemia
The technological investigation of the set of elite jewellery from the Lumbe´s Garden cemetery at Prague Castle enabled a better understanding of these highly complex, and lavish pieces of jewellery from the beginning of the tenth century AD. Fine jewels produced by highly skilled and knowledgeable jewellers co-exist alongside more coarsely manufactured imitations produced by less experienced craftsmen, revealing a process of a gradual acquisition of new technology, initiated, in all likelihood, by the arrival in Bohemia of specialised jewellers and by diplomatic gifts, most likely from Great Moravia, and probably from the Byzantine and the Islamic world.