During excavations of a Roman villa at Fordham, Essex, a remarkable series of decorated bone and antler veneer plaques were recovered from villa destruction deposits. They are datable to the later fourth or fifth centuries a.d. and probably once adorned a casket holding bathing equipment and jewellery. Spread through the three main rooms of the villa, fragments were recovered from at least 10 metres apart, so the object is likely already to have been broken when deposited. The plaques are decorated with ‘late antique’ style figural, zoomorphic, vegetal and architectural motifs on a cross-hatched background, with the best-preserved design probably relating to female bathing.

The reconstruction of the trade routes along which garnets reached Europe in the early Middle Ages demonstrates the persistence of long-distance trade after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Early medieval garnet jewellery from Italy and the presence of lapidary workshops are important evidence for understanding the dynamics of this commerce but are systematically overlooked. Chemical trace-element analysis (LA-ICP-MS) of loose and inset garnets and glass inlays from burials in sixth–seventh-century Lombardy has identified South Asian and Bohemian garnets together with Egyptian glass. This combination shows that the long-distance trade routes crossing the Peninsula and the Alpine passes played a key role in the European market for garnets, significantly modifying the current model of the Mediterranean garnet trade and shedding new light on the character of the elites who emerged in Italy during the Migration period.

This article offers a new perspective on a diverse corpus of high-status Western Slavic objects from the domain of the Piast dynasty in Poland, dated between the tenth and eleventh centuries ad. It is proposed that the lavish zoomorphic decorations, often depicting snakes, found on jewellery, weapons, and equestrian equipment reflected Western Slavic pre-Christian religious ideas and served as material markers of elite identity. The results of this study lead to a more nuanced understanding of Western Slavic worldviews and their material expressions, paving the way for new investigations into cultural interactions both within and beyond the Slavic homelands.

A richly furnished grave of an elite woman from the Hallstatt period was discovered close to the Heuneburg, the earliest proto-urban settlement north of the Alps. Dendrochronological analysis of timbers from the grave chamber dates the burial to 583 BC, the earliest of a series of such burials north of the Alps and a key anchor in the absolute chronology of the Early Iron Age in Europe. The woman was adorned with gold, bronze, jet and amber jewellery; gold filigree objects, amber fibulae and items of horse-head armour suggest close connections south of the Alps. An infant female burial close to the main grave included gold jewellery made for a child but similar to that of the woman.

A hoard of objects found at the early Roman colony at Colchester in a small hole scraped into the floor of a house destroyed during the Boudican revolt includes a group of high-quality gold jewellery, three silver military awards, a bag of coins, an unusual silver-clad wooden box and other items. Buried in haste as the British approached, they provide a remarkably clear image of one couple's background, achievements, taste and social standing. A bulla shows that the man was a Roman citizen, the awards that he was a veteran soldier of some distinction, while parallels for the woman's jewellery suggest that it was acquired in Italy.