Dress, Adornment and Identity in Late Iron Age and Roman Britain

Principal investigator: Liam
Level: PhD level research

This is an AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Award supervised by Dr Gardner and Ms. Sally Worrell of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and Dr. Roger Bland of The Department of Portable Antiquities & Treasure at British Museum.

In many preindustrial societies clothing was a form of non-verbal communication and an important mechanism of social control. Yet, in a view that accords well with the long-held image of the Roman Empire as homogenous and static, the traditional perception of Roman clothing was that it was characterised by changelessness over long distances and periods of time (Harte 1976: 155). This is fallacious. Clothing varied across the Empire according not only to the regions climate but the physical environment of the wearer; and it certainly changed over time. It is possible to discern more rapidly evolving ‘fashion trends’ in the accompanying dress accessories, hairstyles and shoe patterns in particular, and as such it is these which may enable us an insight into diverse local cultures and identities which we now recognise as constituting the Roman Empire.

After Roman coins, brooches are the most common metallic type of artefact recorded, and there are now over 13,000 Late Iron Age and Roman brooches from across England and Wales in the PAS database. Increasingly, small finds studies have demonstrated the importance of bodily adornment as a field of social display with great potential in quantitative and spatial analyses (see Creighton 1990; Haselgrove 1997; Swift 2000; Eckardt 2005; Plouviez 2008; Pitts 2010). However, most of these studies have looked at brooches in isolation and few have gone so far as to attempt to assess the chronological and spatial distribution of the less frequently occurring types of personal adornment, such as hair pins, finger-rings and bracelets. Yet it is only when we consider brooch evidence together with details of other objects relating to dress that we can fully understand the mixture of indigenous and imported traditions that resulted in the creation of diverse local cultures and identities (Jundi and Hill 1998). This is precisely what my study will aim to do, with the intention that high-resolution contextual information from key sites will aid interpretation of the PAS material, which in turn will be augmented by the typological and spatial information from the PAS data. 

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