Early Visigothic Period Belt-Buckles. Status Markers And Symbols Of Identity?

The Visigoths, a new political entity recorded by the sources from the late 4th century A.D., made incursions into the Spanish peninsula during the 5th century, eventually settling in the southern part of the Pyrenees and the Tarraconensis province in the late 5th and 6th centuries. A very particular material culture appeared during that period, very different from previous Roman funerary customs, and with notable similarities with European Germanic burials, and this would change again around historically reported events in the peninsula centred on 589. Beyond questions of ethnicity, this study aims to consider this material culture as a status indicator and social differentiator within this period of rapid change. This thesis centres on one specific type of ‘Visigothic’ object - rectangular plate buckles - as potential social markers. The main Visigothic-era cemeteries are revisited via archival and published sources, complemented with data drawn from visits to museum collections and personal interviews. Such information is used to compile a selection of buckles that are then analysed in terms of variables such as context, associated assemblages, typology, material, design, scarcity, etc., to discuss trends,

similarities and the role that these objects might have played within the material culture of the period and the possible markers of identity and status they might convey of the societies that utilized them. Notwithstanding the disjointed corpus of data available, this thesis explores a selected sample of cemeteries that featured such buckles, and argues that they were indeed part of a Germanic tradition that circulated in Europe during the late 5th and 6th centuries, that acquired a local identity and regional complexity observable mainly in the Spanish peninsula, and that were items of a high degree of artistry that speak much of display, status and identity in a new and reconfigured landscape during Late Antiquity.