Silver against Skin: Exploring the Materiality of the Cividade de Bagunte Torques

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Iron Age of Northwest Portugal: Leftovers of Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Among the most dazzling traces of behaviour left behind by the Castro people of the Cividade de Bagunte in northwestern Iberia are the five silver torques discovered together in a hoard in the mid-twentieth century. The items in the Bagunte hoard share stylistic similarities with other Castro torques, but their material, silver rather than gold, marks them as unique in the corpus of Castro ornaments. Torques manifested a complex network of behaviours and values for the Castro people, and in this paper I aim to untangle the dense significance of these items of personal adornment. I will discuss the Bagunte torques as the particular material manifestations of economic and social forces expressed with technological finesse. I will also explore the social and symbolic work enacted by these objects, including their potential roles in social negotiations, ritual performances, and the formation, maintenance, and negotiation of personal and corporate identity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Iron Age of Northwest Portugal: Leftovers of Behavior   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32590