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The earliest miniature influencers - Ep 24
381 Plays6 months ago
Not all that glitters is gold… Sometimes it’s silver! In today’s episode, Matilda is joined by Egyptologist and Jewelery Historian Sigrid van Roode, to talk all about that most magical of materials: silver. Together, they discuss all the questions about silver that you didn’t even know you had: Why did people used to regularly cut up silver bracelets? What did political issues in central Asia have to do with the Viking raids in Northwest Europe? How can you trust what you see in a photograph? And why should we pay attention to the hairstyle depicted on silver coins? Tune in to find out!
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/teabreak/24
Links
- Sigrid's website
- An interview with Sigrid about life as an independent researcher
- Insta post about the headdress
- Sidestone Press (watch out for Sigrid's book!)
Guest Contact
- Name: Sigrid van Roode
- email: [email protected]
- insta: @bedouinsilver
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- https://www.thearchaeologiststeacup.com
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- fb: /TheArchaeologistsTeacup
- twitter: @ArchaeoTeacup
ArchPodNet
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to Tea Break Time Travel, where every month we look at a different archaeological object and take you on a journey into their past.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 24 of Tea Break Time Travel. I am your host Matilda Ziebrecht and today I am savoring a tea which is called East Frisian Herb Garden. And my goodness, it is so good. It is the most fragrant tea I think I've ever had with roses and mint and everything. I feel like I'm
00:00:34
Speaker
in some, I don't know, I don't know where I feel like I am, but it's very, very nice. And joining me on my tea break today is jewellery historian Sigrid van de Rode. And what are you drinking today, Sigrid? Hi, Matilda. Tea as well this morning, a nice green herbal tea. And you will be very pleased to learn that I'm drinking that from a jewellery themed mug. Oh, exciting. What kind of jewellery theme?
00:00:57
Speaker
Well, our National Museum of Antiquities has a wonderful collection of cameos from ancient times, from ancient Rome, ancient Greece. And they have these incredible photographs that you can just pretty much use for everything. So I printed them on a run of the mill mug. And now I have a million dollar mug. I mean, that's, I've always worked for improving mug collections by adding a little bit of historical archaeological inspiration to them.
Sigrid's Journey into Egyptology and Jewelry
00:01:25
Speaker
And of course, as we mentioned, you are not in fact, an archaeologist, I believe you are a jewelry historian. But did you also study archaeology? Did you study history? How did you get basically to where you are today? Well, how long does this tea breaks?
00:01:42
Speaker
Well, I studied Egyptology. That's what I started out with. That's what I did my master's in also. And during my Egyptology studies, we went to Cairo, of course, because it's really useful to be in Egypt when studying Egypt. And that's where I came across, let's say, modern vintage jewelry. So we're switching from 2000 BCE to 2000 CE right now, 4000 years of a jump.
00:02:11
Speaker
And that's where I came across vintage jewelry from, say, the 1900s, 1950s. I thought, well, that's interesting. What is this? That's where it all started. Simple question, what is this? That's always a good place to start these things.
00:02:28
Speaker
And so when you were doing Egyptology, you weren't necessarily originally focused on the jewellery, that was indeed something that came later. That is definitely something that came later because Egyptology is with us, it's very much focused on texts. So lots of reading, lots of language stages, absolutely fascinating stuff, by the way, really interesting. And of course, there's an archaeological component. So you do learn how to excavate and how to record and how to publish.
00:02:55
Speaker
your findings, but then the jewellery part for me came a little later, I think. Okay, interesting. And how did the interest in Egyptology then, first start? You know, I have no idea. I've always wanted to do this since I can remember. You know, I was one of these little kids in primary school, and when you have to do a talk for your class, then people will be talking about like, my dog or the name of my cat, and I would go like, Rameses II.
00:03:24
Speaker
I've always wanted to do this. It's interesting though, because one of the things that I always find as an archaeologist, one of the sort of assumptions or the stereotypes that people assign to archaeologists is that everyone was always interested in Egyptology. It always seems to be, and you do, you either have people who are interested in, who got into it because of Indiana Jones, who got into it because of history, or who got into it because of Egyptology. That's sort of the three main avenues, it seems to me at least.
00:03:50
Speaker
Well, it happens a lot when I explain to people what I do. I'm an Egyptologist. The first reaction very often will be, oh, I wanted to study that when I was a child. But then they chose a profession that would actually pay. But there is a huge interest in Egyptology. Yeah, that's true.
00:04:08
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's definitely, it's just also such a big, I always find it quite hilarious when people find out I'm an archaeologist and they say, oh, what do you think about? And then ask me some really specific Egyptology question and I go, um, I have no idea. I am as clueless as you about Egyptology. And even if you study Egyptology, I mean, it's such a broad
00:04:30
Speaker
area of study. We had one episode so far with Dr. Colleen Darnell, who is also of course an Egyptologist, and we were chatting a little bit about that with her, but I'm curious about your experience with that. I mean, do you feel like you have a general understanding of the whole of Egypt?
00:04:45
Speaker
the sort of ancient Egypt? Or did you have to specialize in a particular time period or region or something like that? It's totally impossible, at least for me to have an overview of the whole of ancient Egypt. It's 5,000 years. It's a huge country, which at times, of course, was even larger in antiquity. And there is such a wealth of culture, of history, of political developments, of economic developments, of religious developments.
Mystical and Historical Significance of Jewelry
00:05:13
Speaker
It's
00:05:13
Speaker
mind-blowingly impossible to grasp it all, but for me it was, well, it sounds really boring, but I thought it was absolutely fascinating. A very obscure part of funerary rites of the Old and Middle Kingdom that actually occurs in these 5,000 years of history, I think a grand total of eight times. That's what I did my masters on.
00:05:36
Speaker
nothing to do with jewellery. Okay, I was about to say, was there jewellery involved? But no, okay, not even. Not even. Although the sort of funerary rights and, well, for want of a better word ritual, but you know, you know what I mean, kind of ceremonial aspect, I suppose, is something that you still investigate quite a lot in your jewellery studies, I believe. Absolutely. The, let's call it magical part of jewellery.
00:06:01
Speaker
the way it carries meaning, the way you can use it as an amulet, the way it's used in rituals. That is absolutely fascinating to me because I just love what humans can do with their brains, like how they find out science, how they come up with these amazing technological concepts.
00:06:19
Speaker
thousands of years ago, and figuring out how the world works, magic is a part of that. And that is what really appeals to me. We should all have a little bit of magic in us, really. So it's nice to know that it did exist in a way. Maybe it exists still now.
00:06:36
Speaker
And of course, this is a tea break, but it's also a tea break with time travel in it. So the classic question that I'm sure everyone who studies anything to do in the past always receives, but I nevertheless always ask my guests as well, if you could travel back in time, where would you go and why? Well, my standard answer would be, well, ancient Egypt, of course, but then there is when in ancient Egypt. Yeah, gosh golly.
00:07:03
Speaker
to one of the eight funerary rites or perhaps, but that might be a bit depressing. I don't know, maybe to see how they built the pyramids or sitting on a jewelry workshop, but that would be my standard answer. But since I've come to work in the archaeology of Northwestern Europe,
00:07:22
Speaker
Maybe I also would like to go to Merovingian jewelry artists and see how they did that, that waffle background in these inlays of garneting gold. How? So it's undecided, either of those two.
00:07:38
Speaker
You can do a sort of a two-stop tour, you know, a tour through the jewellery of the past. I cannot ask Doctor Who to take me anywhere, right? Exactly, yeah. There you go. And out of curiosity, because this is something, we've chatted about it once or twice on this podcast already, if you would go back in time, would you want to be able to actually interact with the people or would you prefer to be a kind of fly on the wall just watching?
00:08:00
Speaker
fly on the wall, definitely. I would like to watch what they're doing without my own presence inserted in it. And that's even assuming I have a universal translator that magically speaks ancient Egyptian, because I think I would be, I don't know if they burned people
The Historical Role of Silver
00:08:16
Speaker
at the stake. But I think my chances would be really good.
00:08:21
Speaker
What was, out of curiosity, the language in ancient Egypt? How did that develop? Did that develop into Arabic? Was it a completely separate language? How did that fit in? It's a separate language with part of the same family group, so of the Semitic languages, with a little bit of African languages mixed in.
00:08:42
Speaker
So it's very distinct. But one of the most amazing things when I got to modern Egypt was learning that languages sometimes do not change all that much. The words in particular, when I was sitting in a cafe and asking for the bill, that was the exact same word that an ancient Egyptian might have understood. And I was like, wow, that same root, because Arabic works with roots and ancient Egyptian does as well.
00:09:06
Speaker
It's still valid. How amazing is this? I can actually speak ancient Egyptian and they might sort of get me in one word and not a grammatical sentence. Yeah, they might not really understand why you want to pay for a coffee, but you know, the cultural translation, I guess, is a whole different side of things in that respect.
00:09:26
Speaker
But well, thank you very, very much for joining me on my tea break today. I'm excited to get into discussion. But before we look at today's, well, object or material, we're first going to journey back around 5000 years to the region of what we would now call Turkey. It's morning, the sun is already climbing high in the sky, casting its rays over the plains and the low hills. In the shadow of one of these hills, the relative piece of the morning is suddenly interrupted by a faint but persistent sound of hammering.
00:09:55
Speaker
We venture forward, skipping our hands through the tall grass, and see an opening split into the rock propped up with wooden beams. Crawling in further between these beams, we witness figures spaced alongside a tunnel, each one hammering against the walls with a range of different tools. One of the figures grunts in sudden satisfaction as they manage to pry from the rock a misshapen lump that shines in the faint beams of sunlight filtering through the entrance.
00:10:20
Speaker
The lump is tossed into a nearby basket, along with more lumps of a variety of sizes, all of them gleaming and reflecting with an almost, one might say, silvery sheen. And this may be, of course, completely incorrect. I was looking up pictures of raw silver.
00:10:35
Speaker
And it did look slightly silvery to me, but maybe the raw material is actually a bit duller. But today, indeed, we are looking at silver. Silver jewelry, to be precise, but we're first going to talk a little bit about silver. But before we do, we're going to have a very, very quick break. So we will be back soon.
00:10:54
Speaker
Welcome back, everyone. So of course, those of you who listen in regularly to the podcast will know that I usually like to first look at the most asked questions on the internet about the particular object we're looking at, courtesy of Google Search, Autofill. In order to see what other people are wanting to find out about this object, and seeing as we have Seagrid here today, we might get some answers. Although actually, there was surprisingly little in Google Autofill questions about silver.
00:11:21
Speaker
A lot of the things about silver seem to be related to price and cost and how much things you can sell things for and all of that kind of stuff. But one question that did come up quite a bit in various forms was what was silver used for in ancient times? Which I'll allow you to interpret that question to answer how you will.
00:11:40
Speaker
That is an amazingly broad question indeed. So in ancient times it was used a lot for jewelry. So like beads and bracelets and necklaces and things like that. But also to make little statues. In the Roman period, for example, you have little statues of your household gods, which might be in silver. So yeah, because silver used to be, and this is something that very few people realize,
00:12:09
Speaker
in ancient times could be way more expensive, more valuable than gold. Really? Okay. Well, do you know why that was? But for ancient Egypt, I know it was because silver does not naturally occur in Egypt itself. So it had to be thwarted. It's also a little more difficult to work than gold.
00:12:31
Speaker
So you want to transport it from large distances and that makes it rare. Okay, interesting. And when did that change then? I mean, when did? Because I'm just trying to think.
00:12:43
Speaker
As far as I can think, gold's always been seen as the treasure or something. Was there a particular reason that silver started to become more common? I think when it became more widely available, so in the first millennium, this is when coinage was invented, what silver was also used for, but that's much, much later. My vision of antiquity is like 5000 B.C. or something.
00:13:08
Speaker
the modern period after. That's when Silver also started to be mined in, for example, India, because you have this huge trade route opening. And that is when it becomes more common. I see. Okay. Oh, that's really fascinating that Silva was the prize possession in those days.
00:13:32
Speaker
And I mean, that relates a bit, you mentioned coins there, that relates a bit actually to the other question that came up a lot. Like I say, it was mainly silver coins, how much cost silver coins, how much can you buy them for and all this kind of thing. But a lot of the questions were about why are silver coins important? And I guess maybe a question would be why are coins so important to look at from a historical perspective or from an archaeological perspective?
00:13:54
Speaker
But to be honest, I don't know much about coins because well, as you know, archaeology, insanely wide field and point studies is a whole different ballgame also for me. But you can, of course, use coins for dating purposes. Also very interesting in the field of personal adornment.
00:14:12
Speaker
is that when you have, for example, Roman coins, you might have an image of the Roman empress on it. And she would be dictating the latest in fashion. So coins that spread through the empire would also be used as sort of like little influencer tokens. So people would look at the coins and say, ooh, this is the hairstyle I've got sport right now. And then everybody would go in and do that.
00:14:39
Speaker
Yeah, which if you think about it now, I'm trying to think of our court like, you know, you had the Queen who of course is with us no longer, but I think she basically had the same hairstyle and the same look in every single coin, but it would be really cool if she had a different, different hairstyle. Each one.
00:14:54
Speaker
really interesting. I didn't realise that. And were coins therefore used? Because I know that nowadays, you're technically not allowed, I think, if a coin is a valid coin, they're not allowed to drill a hole in it and use it as jewelry and that kind of thing. But were coins also quite often? Because I imagine a lot of cultures that interacted with cultures that used coins didn't have coinage yet. They didn't use
00:15:18
Speaker
coins as a kind of system of money. So do you also see a lot of coins used in jewelry? Definitely. That's also because in antiquity, the value of the coin was dictated by its silver content or its gold content. So there's not an abstract standard that defines currency, what your coins is worth.
00:15:38
Speaker
but it's the actual coin. So you could also just easily cut it in half and then you would have two halves, which you could still pay with. Something we can't do. Imagine trying to do that at the coffee shop down the road. Half euro. Exactly. I don't have 50 cents. Have a look. Have a euro coin. Let me chop it up. Oh, that's really interesting. So you see a lot of kind of chopped up bits of coin.
00:16:01
Speaker
Yes, you do. And you also see a lot of chopped up bits of silver, which equal the amount of silver that would have been in coins. You see this, for example, in periods where times get troubling, when there's wars, when there's unrest, when there is not sufficient coinage flooding into the areas that need them to pay with.
00:16:22
Speaker
Like at the end of the Roman Empire, for example, there is not enough coinage in the world for the Romans to pay their mercenaries. So what you see is chopped up silver, chopped up drinking vessels, chopped up trees, and their weight matches that of the worth of silver coins that would have been used to pay soldiers and army parts.
00:16:46
Speaker
I imagine if we're finding them archaeologically, that means that they didn't melt them down and make them into something else. They just carried around then half a drinking cup worth of silver. Of course, it was smashed to bits and pieces. You also see them folded several times so they would be easier to carry. And then you could just pay with that because the worth in silver is what matters, not how it was decorated or
00:17:09
Speaker
how old it is, in short, all of the things that we value an object by today. This is really rare and it's beautifully worked. And look at this wonderful object that was like, okay, it's this much grams of silver. Great. That's what it's worth.
00:17:25
Speaker
Oh wow, I'm now just thinking, I'm thinking of, I remember there was a Viking exhibition I went to and they had, I can't remember if it was a hoard or if it was just sort of an exhibition space, part of the exhibition, which showed different parts of jewellery. And I think there were some that were really squashed or bent out of shape or things like that. And I'm trying to remember now, but I think that might've also been what you were talking about. They called it silver bullion or something. No, silver, I can't remember what the word was, but
00:17:53
Speaker
Yeah, which is really, that's really interesting now that I'm thinking about it.
Vikings and the Allure of Silver
00:17:57
Speaker
But that's so it's such a shame that with these beautiful bracelets, and they were just flattened and twisted out of shape. And yeah, it's their weight that that counted. Yeah. Oh, can you imagine being like a jeweler and you've spent hours creating this beautiful object and then you see it in someone's pocket the next day cut in half with
00:18:16
Speaker
Well, actually, there is one interesting story that I could tell you very quickly about the relation between Vikings, coins and running rampant. Sounds good already. Yeah. So this was in the 9th to 11th centuries when
00:18:32
Speaker
We're going all over the world right now, so this story is going to be in Western Europe, in Scandinavia, and in Central Asia. And we're starting in Central Asia, where there were several local rulers. They were officially part of the Arab Empire, but they were more like
00:18:48
Speaker
franchising, you could say, like running their own game and acknowledging the Sultan nominally, like, okay, you're the guy, we pay taxes, but otherwise just leave us alone. It's like a kingdom in the kingdom situation. And they traded with people from Scandinavia.
00:19:05
Speaker
around the shores of the Volga, that's sort of like the meeting point. Scandinavians, they would come and they would trade honey and furs and slaves as well, sadly, and then they would get paid in silver coins in Derabs. That's why they minted in like Tashkent and Summercom, then you know, all these silk road cities. But
00:19:27
Speaker
Franchising takes up a lot of money because you have to pay off pretty much everyone and to keep up your own lavish kingdom, you need cash. So the silver mines in Central Asia became depleted over time. And as a result, these coins devaluated. There was more copper mixed in, more other materials. So the silver content dropped.
00:19:50
Speaker
The people in Scandinavia loved these silver coins. They used them also to melt down and make jewelry from their wife. So a lot of the Viking jewelry, you could say, is made of these deer arms that were melted out. But then, all of a sudden, they realized they were sort of getting scammed because these coins were devaluating. They were not as high in silver content as they were before.
00:20:13
Speaker
So they expressed their discontent, shall we say, but there was not much more to get from Central Asia. And this is one of the reasons, combined with economic decline and climate change, why they ran these plundering expeditions to Western Europe, where there was a lot of silver to be found in monasteries and churches.
00:20:34
Speaker
And so, you see how these raids of the Vikings are not just isolated incidents. They actually have a long history and they're the outcome of several factors, including people franchising for themselves in Central Asia. Amazing. And people who just love silver. I mean, the Vikings just really liked silver. They really did. Of course, just jewelry.
00:20:56
Speaker
Oh, wow, that's really cool. And I do love I remember learning about the sort of trade routes, indeed, between Scandinavia and kind of Central Asia. And it's just so fascinating to I think so many people have this opinion of especially prehistoric. I mean, that I know that wasn't the sort of on the edge of prehistory and history, that they just kind of stayed in their little places and they didn't move around and they didn't interact with other cultures. And it was all very isolated. And but it wasn't it was so, yeah, connected everything.
00:21:24
Speaker
Absolutely. Jewelry is a perfect source to tell us this, like the grave in Birka in Scandinavia also, where they found a silver ring with an amethyst, which contains an Arabic inscription.
Jewelry as a Historical Lens
00:21:38
Speaker
Wow, okay. Jewelry traveled and it shows us how people were actually way more connected than we sometimes give them credit for.
00:21:47
Speaker
So on the topic of jewelry, because silver jewelry is your specialty, one might say, or jewelry in general. I don't know if it is silver jewelry or if it's just jewelry that you specialize in. It's just jewelry in general, but when it comes to the recent Middle East, it's silver jewelry.
00:22:05
Speaker
Okay. How does that silver jewellery differ from jewellery made from other precious metals? Is it just a case of what's available at the time, or what's more culturally wanted, or are there other reasons for a preference for silver in certain areas?
00:22:21
Speaker
that really depends on either the geographical area and the time frame that we're talking about. Because in some periods and in some regions, silver was more expensive because it was rarer, it was associated with the moon, with the silver light of the moon, and as such was a beautiful counterpart to gold, which was then associated with the golden rays of the sun.
00:22:47
Speaker
Right. In other timeframes you see that silver is the cheaper version of gold jewellery because it became more common, it became more available and then of course there are timeframes in which silver jewellery is completely different from gold jewellery and it's really a category of its own.
00:23:06
Speaker
Okay, interesting. You've already mentioned a couple of things about why jewellery is important in looking at the past, but what would you say if you had to give a kind of elevator pitch for why we should study ancient jewellery or why we should study silver jewellery, but jewellery in general, what would be your kind of argumentation?
00:23:30
Speaker
Well, my elevator pitch for studying jewelry? Oh, that's very easy, because jewelry is an actual historic source, which tells us so much about movement of people, about availability of materials, about fears of contact, like coins. This is going to be a very long elevator, right? I hope we're... That's fine. That's totally fine. We have time. Great, great.
00:23:50
Speaker
So like when you look at coins worked in jewelry, you can see this coin is from here, this coin is from there, but those coins do not travel further than so that tells you something about the spheres of interaction of people. You can see from the inscriptions from the techniques used, how they influenced one another and how civilizations are actually more connected, both geographically and in time. And it's portable and it's gorgeous. It is pretty.
00:24:17
Speaker
And it still remains pretty to the modern day. I don't think I've seen any kind of ancient jewellery that I've ever been like, oh, yeah, I mean, it's fine, but it's not really that great. That's not a thing. It's so incredibly, incredibly relatable. Whenever I do talk about jewellery, it doesn't almost matter what the talk is about, because the pictures themselves are what get people excited. And then you tell the story with it. So there is an amazing amount of information that you can just cram into slides with jewellery.
00:24:45
Speaker
And people will always be like, oh, I didn't know that, that is interesting, didn't think of that. It's a really easy way of sharing history with people. Yeah. And do you see that the jewellery develops
00:25:01
Speaker
a lot over time? Does it change a lot throughout time? So for example, the particular region that you specialize in, I don't know whether that would be Egypt or somewhere else in the Middle East, maybe, do you see that there would be a lot of would you be able to look at a piece of jewelry and say, that's definitely from this time period, because it's that style? Or is it quite sort of, does it have a long living history in that respect? Both actually, okay, jewelry changes a lot.
00:25:27
Speaker
over time because ancient Egyptian jewelry is nowhere near similar to modern-day Egyptian jewelry. But when you trace developments over time and you see these influences of different styles being mixed in, it's very easy to see the development from ancient Egypt to today.
00:25:48
Speaker
And there are, of course, some long-standing favorites like crescent moon symbolism that way predates Islam, for example. It's now a very famous symbol, but it's much older than that. The use of the eye, also used in ancient Egypt, still present in eye beads, and you can trace that development over time.
00:26:09
Speaker
Reversely, I would say, you do need to be able to trace that development over time, because it's very easy to say, oh, this looks like that. And there's only 4,000 gears in between. But that doesn't make it a direct descendant. Okay, so you have to know a lot about the context as well, I guess. Yes. Yeah, that's imperative. Interesting.
00:26:31
Speaker
And I had sort of another question that I just thought of, actually, in terms of, because of course it is, a lot of jewellery is made from front precious metals, such as silver and those kind of things. It's very unlike a lot of other archaeological objects that I've kind of featured so far on this podcast have been things that I've been trying to share with the public, because I think they're really interesting and fascinating, but maybe from an outside perspective, they're made from, you know, a more boring material, or they don't look quite as fancy, or all that kind of thing.
00:26:58
Speaker
But I imagine silver jewellery, as we've said, has a very different reaction for people. But I can imagine there's also a negative side of that. So, is there a lot of problems in terms of ancient silver jewellery, antiquities, vintage jewellery, and that respect of being sold on things like the black market, or being stolen from places, or anything
The Dark Side of Archaeological Jewelry Trade
00:27:19
Speaker
like that?
00:27:19
Speaker
Oh, don't get me started. Absolutely. That is spot on. I think the biggest problem with archaeological artifacts, whether they be jewelry or other things made from precious materials, because these materials are still valuable today. And their antiquity only adds to their value. So yeah, there's a lot of metal detecting going on that is illegal. There's also a lot of
00:27:44
Speaker
of metal detecting going on with people actually sharing their finds and allowing them to be studied. And so that way we may actually learn from the past. But there is a lot being just dug up illegally and solved. And then you have all these people, look, I have a Roman ring, a Greek ring, medieval ring. And then my heart just breaks a little because I think within its context, this ring could have told us so much more.
00:28:10
Speaker
And now it can't, it's just an object instead of an object in context. And that's the archaeologist in me, I need the context to go with it. So I mean, even if people would find something would make sure to, I don't know, document it all correctly and everything, and then they might still be able to keep the rig afterwards, but you would say you would recommend that people try to sort of document how they found it, where it was found, etc, before they take it.
00:28:36
Speaker
Well, I would recommend actually not to dig it out at all, unless it's, of course, very close to the surface. But to call in archaeologists and have it excavated, we've had here in the Netherlands some amazing results of excavations that were carried out as a result of metal detector finds. Okay.
00:28:54
Speaker
And it was just mind-blowingly fantastic. What we learned about the sites where these things were found, there's one example of a coin hoard that was found that turned out to be a early medieval sort of sacrificial ritual place, where over the course of consecutive centuries, people would have come and offered to whatever gods they thought were present there.
00:29:19
Speaker
That story would never have been available if it was only just, oh, look, it's a gold coin, the end. Context is everything. It might just look like a little bit of silver dory, but maybe you'll be part of an even bigger adventure. Exactly. Let's share the bigger adventure.
00:29:37
Speaker
And maybe a final little question before we go into the next break. What would you say is your favorite fact related to silver jewelry? Oh, that's a good one. I think it's, for me, it would be its versatility when you look at the way silver has been used over time. I don't mean its technical versatility, but how it's valued. So it can be top of the bill, the most amazingly expensive material that you would use for the gods.
00:30:06
Speaker
And simultaneously, it can be the material that you use for a cheap knockoff. That is amazing. Which other material in history does that? Right. And again, depending on the context. Yeah, yeah. That's a very good fact. I like that one. Okay, so we're gonna have another very quick break so that those listing could have an opportunity to top up their tea, but we'll be back soon for the final part.
00:30:32
Speaker
Welcome back, everybody. Hope the teacups are now fuller and the biscuit jar is emptier. So, Sigrid, we did already introduce you a little bit and your experience in the sort of first section of this episode, but maybe we can go into a bit more detail about your specific experience. So we talked a bit about your Egyptology background, but in terms of kind of jewelry historian, what exactly is a jewelry historian? How does one become a jewelry historian?
00:30:59
Speaker
Well, to be honest, I have no idea how I ended up here. It just sort of happened. So a jewellery historian, unsurprisingly, looks at jewellery. And there are several ways to interpret what it is we do, because there are those of us that work more like an art historian. So they will be able to date and describe and place jewellery in an art historian development.
00:31:25
Speaker
And then there are those of us that sort of more like archaeologists also place them in their cultural, technological, economical, social, religious context. That sounds good. So again, it seems the theme of all of these things, archaeology, Egyptology, historian, is that it's very broad. It is. Wiggle room to do what you like. Yeah, which is great in that respect.
00:31:51
Speaker
You mentioned that sometimes there are more similarities to archaeology. What would you say, having had experience in both, would be the main difference between what you're doing now versus the training that you had in archaeology and Egyptology?
00:32:06
Speaker
Well, to be honest, what I'm doing now is pretty much how I think it should be done. So it's actually what I do is archaeology, but then with jewelry. So I still look at an object in its context always because that is second nature to me.
00:32:21
Speaker
and you see sometimes in jewelry history that jewelry is observed as a standalone object. One of the examples that I often use is with the traditional jewelry of the Middle East that I specialize in. If you only look at the jewelry, you're going to miss out that the same patterns occur in henna tattoos, in dress weaving, in basketry, in
00:32:43
Speaker
in buildings. So placing everything into context is really important to me. And I think that might be a difference with more like traditional jewelry historians who really go in the art historian development of jewelry as a standalone object.
00:33:00
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. Well, we're seeing it as a special object, I suppose, in that respect, rather than seeing it as part of a group of other interrelated parts. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. No, that's really nice. I also, it just reminded me of your, I remember you did a series of Instagram posts at some point where you were sharing photos of people from at least cultures in the historic period that were wearing jewelry, and you were pointing out how
00:33:26
Speaker
they were wearing it wrong. It wasn't the right way to wear that jewellery, they'd obviously just been photographed. Maybe you can expand on that a bit, because I found that really interesting. The stage photographs. In the early 19th century, you got this development of photography and also of travel and of colonisation.
00:33:44
Speaker
And good old colonization. Well, it happened. Then you have this. This is a perfect mix of people wanting to share what these exotic new lands that they ended up in look like and how beautiful the women were adorned with jewelry. Because imagine in in 20th century, early 20th century Europe looks completely different from the
00:34:08
Speaker
exuberant abundance of contemporaneous Middle East. So they would send photographs home, they would create sort of scenes and types, type of photography, where you sort of catalog people, it's unbelievable, but they did that. And then they dress up people in whatever jewelry they find lying about, just to make them even more exotic.
00:34:33
Speaker
These, in turn, are now often used as sources for the study of this particular type of jewelry. What I wanted to do with these Instagram posts is point out that even photography is not really reliable when it's constructed.
00:34:48
Speaker
I found them very interesting. For anyone who's listening who wants to check them out, I think they were... I can't remember when they were done, but if you scroll a little bit down in the profile, I'm sure you'll find some. They were really, really fascinating. I'll try and find some specific examples and put them in the show notes because that was something I hadn't even thought about before. Like you say, you think of a photograph as like, oh yeah, but it's a photograph. Of course it's real, but like you say, it's still staged.
00:35:13
Speaker
Well, that's also that happens a lot when we're trying to reconstruct how people looked in the past. A very interesting crossover between both my fields of expertise, I'd say, is when traditional jewelry from the Middle East is used to portray people that supposedly lived in the past. So you'll have an image of, for example, a Roman lady, which then will be decked out in Yemeni jewelry. And I'm like, why?
00:35:43
Speaker
why would you do this? And the large Afghan cuff bracelets that were created in the 1980s, specifically for the hippy trail and for ballet dance things, they were used to be put on sturdy looking soldiers, like Roman guys, just to make them look more Roman. I think I know the ones you mean. Yeah, I can picture them in my mind.
00:36:12
Speaker
And that to me is mind-boggling, because first, antiquity has its own splendid jewellery, and you can actually make replicas of that. There are tons of experimental jewellery experiments going on, making traditional jewellery from ancient times. So replicas, that's amazing.
00:36:30
Speaker
That's one culture, and then there is the culture of Afghanistan, of other countries in the Middle East, that stand on their own as well. Why would you conflate the two? It's just, I don't get it. Would you say that that's improving in recent years in terms of the research that's being done and the kind of representation or depiction of the past?
00:36:51
Speaker
Sadly, no. One of the posts that you were talking about that got a lot of reactions was a post of a lady that was wearing a head jewel as a face veil. So what would have been on the top of her head was mounted in front of her face to look like a face veil. That was 100 years ago. A couple of years ago, I visited in Berlin the Pergamon panorama.
00:37:16
Speaker
absolutely beautiful site, reconstruction of ancient Pergamon and the Pergamon altar. And it is populated with people who were photographed and mixed in. It's an artwork. It's not a rendering of the truth. It's an artwork dish, I should say. And there I saw the same thing.
00:37:32
Speaker
So I was looking around there, admiring how all of these people were reconstructed and how meticulously it was done. And then I saw another woman, supposedly in antiquity, wearing a headdress as a face veil. And then I may have exclaimed, oh no, not again.
00:37:48
Speaker
Lots of people looking at me like, what's wrong with her? Because I was just sort of talking, you know, myself, ranting more like it. But no, we still use traditional jewelry from another culture to create conjure up an image of the past.
00:38:04
Speaker
And it's such a shame because, I mean, like you say, you were admiring, you know, the other, the way that the other ones have been done, but it may be, I suppose that there's certain things that you see, and if that's not your particular area of expertise, then you might think, oh yeah, that's done really nicely. But then if you actually know it, you'll go, oh no, but if that one's done wrong, what's the rest of it?
00:38:22
Speaker
How real is the rest of it, actually? Yes. Far be it for me to be the authenticity police, of course. That's not up to me, certainly not in an artwork. But I'm just stunned that you would do such meticulous research on the correct rendering of the Pergamon Altar, so the architecture itself, and then populate it with people you just sort of randomly dress up in whatever you find lying about. Like a fancy universe, you know, a little bit of an amalgamation of everything.
Independent Research in Jewelry History
00:38:56
Speaker
And speaking of research though, so you are affiliated with the university, I believe, but then you are sort of almost classified as an independent researcher, would you say? Or how would you define yourself in that respect? Yes, independent researcher, definitely. So I'm affiliated with Leidy University now because of my PhD that I'm doing there. But I'm doing that as an external candidate.
00:39:18
Speaker
Okay. And in terms of, because we've had sort of a range of guests on the podcast, some of them are crafters, some of them academic researchers, some of them have their own businesses. What would you say are the kind of advantages or the disadvantages of working as an independent researcher in a research topic that's sort of very specific, like the one that you have? It definitely has advantages in that I can totally chart my own course.
00:39:41
Speaker
I really can do whatever I think is best. And so that also comes down to identifying things that I would like to research that I think are important. A disadvantage is I'm not part of an academic group that I can just walk over to bounce ideas around and just be a part of. But I found that academic tribe on Instagram that also where I found you actually. We found each other.
00:40:10
Speaker
That is amazing. It's lovely to have this platform with like-minded souls working on things that interest me. And one major disadvantage of being an independent researcher is that when I will have finished my PhD, I will no longer have access to the university library.
00:40:30
Speaker
Yes, right. Which is a bit of a drag because that's where all the interesting stuff is. Yeah. Well, I'd imagine even not even just the library, but also having that affiliation allows you to read lots of online journals and things as well. Yeah, I find it that as well now that that's a really big issue.
00:40:47
Speaker
It's not so much the library itself. I mean, it won't kick me up when I show up. It's just open for the public. Anyone can go there. But the ease that I have now in reading exactly as you mentioned, the journals and just looking up something on this or something on that, that will all be gone in a few months.
00:41:04
Speaker
Yeah, hopefully it might be possible at some point to have an almost sort of external affiliation for independent research. That would be really nice. Right, it would be really useful. I'm trying to work that out for my various projects, but anyway, I've got too many projects going on, so there's all sorts of things happening.
00:41:21
Speaker
And so for others who might be thinking, you know, okay, well, I, you know, I don't really want to do sort of the university career side of things, but I do really love research. How, what sort of advice would you give? Or, you know, to put it another way, maybe looking back at sort of the path that you've taken, would you have done anything differently? If you could speak to your sort of younger self, what do you wish that you had known them that you know now? The younger self, I would definitely have screamed at, learn Arabic for God's sake.
00:41:50
Speaker
Because my Arabic is very, very limited. It's just only spoken Arabic that I picked up in Egypt, which is really stupid because now I cannot read the whole Arabic side of research on jewelry, which is really, really a shortcoming. So that is something that I definitely would impress on younger me. And otherwise, I would say to people who would want to pursue this path, just go for it. Just do it. You can make your own career. You just have to stick with it and keep going.
00:42:20
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it's one of those scary things, right, of taking that big first step. Yeah, but I think I've always paired it with an actual job as an archaeologist here in the Netherlands, mostly part-time. So that way, I had a job that I absolutely love and an income. And the time that I'm not working in my actual job, I can go to my other actual job, which is being an independent researcher.
00:42:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, worst comes to worst, you have a lot of silver materials that you know, you can fall back on, right? And we've just worked out it's not about the objects, it's about the material it's made from. So you have a lot of accumulated wealth. I do. I do. Yes.
00:43:05
Speaker
I can't imagine that you would sell it for the material content though. Absolutely not. My research collection is something that I really love because it allows you to just keep on returning to it when you find out something new. Oh, this is present here as well and never looked at it that way. That's amazing. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, gosh, when I see the pictures of your collection, it just looks fantastic. I really want to visit it in person one day. You will be most welcome.
00:43:31
Speaker
And final question, so have you got any exciting projects or research ideas coming up that you are able to tell us about? Oh, absolutely. Because drum roll, drum roll, I'm about to finish my PhD, which will be in June of this year, I hope.
00:43:47
Speaker
So that will also see my new book coming out and that will be about jewelry that was used in Egypt of the 19th and 20th century CE by women who believed they were possessed by a spirit and they would have a ritual that involved jewelry and the whole book is about what they did with that jewelry. So super excited about that.
00:44:11
Speaker
Yeah, very exciting. And June, so that means because this episode will be released end of May, so it'll be imminent once you're listening to this. It's either imminent or it's out. So have a look. If it's out, I'll try to put it in the show notes or at least put where it can be found. And I'm also going to be working on a couple of museum collections that I'm very excited about, you know, just to help them with their inventory and correct descriptions and perhaps make a publication out of it. So
00:44:39
Speaker
A lot of fun things to do. Exciting. Excellent. Well, on that note, I think I'd better leave you to it. Sounds like you've got a lot to get back to. Thank you very, very much for joining me today, Sigurd. I'm really glad that you could take the time today to chat to me about Silver, her jewellery. Well, thank you for having me because you know me. I always loved to rant about Silver and jewellery.
00:45:00
Speaker
And if anyone wants to find out more about Seagrid's work, maybe read her upcoming PhD thesis, et cetera, or find out more about Silver Jewelry, check out the show notes on the podcast homepage. I'll put all of the links that I can on there. I hope that you enjoyed our journey today. If you want to help support this show and all of the other amazing series that form at the Archaeology Podcast Network,
00:45:20
Speaker
you can become a member of the APN. You'll be helping us to create even more amazing content. You will also have exclusive access to ad-free episodes and also bonus content like our quarterly online seminars looking at different topics within archaeology. For more information, check out the homepage at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. I hope that you enjoyed our journey today. If you did, make sure to like, follow, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and I'll see you next month for another episode of Tea Break Time Travel.
00:45:49
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.