When we look at artefacts from the very earliest human settlements, we find axes, knives, bone tools and jewellery. We could broadly categorise the objects as survival, invention and adornment. The first two categories seem to be about doing something in an objective sense. The last category seems almost incidental. Thus, whilst the history of war and technology dominate our telling of the human story, the history of jewellery does not. This is a mistake.
To understand why, we need to look more closely at ourselves. At a certain point in time, a human being – Homo sapiens – stood on Earth. She was fully human, as you or I are, and she was there somewhere at the start of the great human event we are a part of. Like the animals living around her she had consciousness, an awareness of having life. Unlike those animals, she could travel in time.
She was not confined to the moment of now that other creatures lived in. That trait – a mind not anchored in the present – is an essential precondition for our perception of meaning. We infer backwards and forwards in time to attach abstract significance to objects. This ability transformed reality for her in a way that no other species had ever experienced.
Everything – the grass under her feet, the blue of the sky, the glimmer of the stars - turned into a question. The questions – an infinity of them – took a world that filled the senses of every other creature and replaced it with a world that was, for her, largely empty. The emptiness was like a vacuum, a colossal existential chasm that she needed to fill. We are the only creature on the planet that is not complete simply being sustained within our habitat.
History holds the record of this mental struggle. One of the earliest collections of jewellery ever found is at the Sungir burial site in Russia, dated 32,000 years before the present. A man and two boys were interred. Placed alongside them were 13,000 mammoth ivory beads, hundreds of fox tooth beads and several carved ivory arm bands.
Why?
Because, in essence, these ornaments shout the same message as the jewellery adorning the living: This is not just a body. There is more here than aging bones. Like the tip of an iceberg, the visible ornamentation we wear represents a vast unseen world of meaning that compels manifestation.
Our need to assign meaning to objects finds apotheosis in creating objects only for this purpose. By doing so we bridge the invisible world within our minds and the material world, externalising our reality. Identity, emotions, beliefs and memories become tactile. Put simply, jewellery is the visible part of the human soul.
Axes, knives, bone tools, ornaments: We are comfortable viewing ourselves through the lens of survival, struggle and intellectual development because it represents the rational part of our being. Rationality has become our shelter from that existential chasm.
Ornamentation is the odd one out.
Scholarly analysis of it often reverts to tropes – the items had ritual function, it established social status, the amulet was needed for passage to the afterlife. Such frameworks have become the standard interpretive toolkit of archaeology and museum culture because they reduce the emotional and existential complexity of our past to cultural ephemera that we can regard with, yes, rational detachment.
In doing so we present ancient humans not as individuals with interior lives, but as a cast of interchangeable archetypes - the Shaman, the Warrior, the Fertility Mother, the Chieftain - placed behind a curatorial guardrail, just beyond our everyday experience.
It is understandable. Academic language is ill-equipped for questions of the human spirit. We can study weapons and tools with detachment because they address challenges that we believe we have solved or are capable of solving. Ornamentation, by contrast, doesn’t ask how we survived, but who we are. It places us out with the ideological and social constructs of our time and holds a mirror to the mind.
Modern depictions of Viking-era Britain often portray a brutal and primitive era, where strength was through steel and wealth weighed in gold. The reality of encountering in person the jewellery of this period abruptly confronts those assumptions. The gold-work is delicate, often ethereal. Immense thought is present in the meticulous granulation that would sparkle by firelight, the segmentation of belts that would disperse outlines like a snakeskin.
There are finely executed filigree techniques and works of minute, geometric precision that are hard to comprehend. The skill involved in producing such jewellery without modern tools reveals a patient and determined dedication to beauty that pushed the limit of technical possibilities. What compelled such artistry during those Dark Ages of sword and fire, of tooth decay and plague?
We do not need to imagine elaborate social forces or mythologies to explain it. We need only look inward. When we hold such treasures, we recognise adornment that does not shout for prominence but quietly gives evidence of the soul’s desire to be seen.
Some part of this desire is denied in contemporary Western society. Whilst we are marketed to consume as never before, a culture of sameness suppresses personal expression. For instance, it’s often deemed un-masculine to wear expressive jewellery, unless one is prepared to be labelled eccentric or effeminate. Women, too, must rationalise their adornment - It’s a way to express joy… Frivolous things are a reminder of light-heartedness - as though beautiful things cannot simply exist to resonate the heart’s song, like a tuning pin, and sing into the dark.
A shift in self-expression and worth can be tentatively traced back to later-medieval Europe. The connection between dignity and decoration was explicit: sumptuary laws determined who could wear gold, gems, and fine fabrics - not just to enforce social hierarchy but to control identity itself. It’s said that what authority fears, it prohibits; what it values, it claims. This wasn’t merely about class. It was about control on a grand scale.
That is not to say that the world was a more humane place prior to the late medieval period. Rather, that there has been a palpable shift in how we perceive ourselves since the Super Tankers of power breached the horizon: Monarchical Empire, The Church, the rise of Scientism, Globalized Capitalism. The means vary greatly, but the overarching proscription is on how high you can lift your chin.
There is a subtle difference when we look at the ornaments of ancient peoples, of smaller societies. Art was the spirit worn on the body – one hand always touching the invisible. There is a presence of being in many of these artefacts that we should pay attention to. We live in an age of relative well-being, when an anaesthetized, even luxurious existence is within reach for most. Survival and invention have taken us very far. Yet, conformity is heavily conditioned.
This is the era of corporations, of domination through information control and overload. Alexander Hurst has described the ‘sprawl’ of modern life as “devoid of art, beauty and truth alike… the peculiar desolation of ‘too much’.” That is why our connection to the past matters. To an extent humanity is a collective experience, past and present. Identity, with all its rich layers of meaning, is our most individual trait, but it is best preserved by a communal cohesion deeply rooted in history. That is the whisper recorded within the history of jewellery. Somewhere, on the road from the burial sites at Sungir to the 21st century, an important message has faded. We are not these bones.