A new study of the penannular brooch in Britain

Principal investigator: Anna Booth
Level: PhD level research

This is an AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Award supervised by Professor Colin Haselgrove at the University of Leicester and Dr. Roger Bland of The Department of Portable Antiquities & Treasure at British Museum.
Penannular brooches were manufactured and used for an unusually long period of time; from the later Iron Age, into the Roman and Early Medieval periods. Analysis of their distribution and deposition has the potential to shed light on, amongst other things, individual and group identity, regionality, inter-regional interaction and movement, ritual behaviour, and craft production and exchange in each period. However, the long lifespan of this brooch type also makes it a useful tool for generating insights into longer-term developments and continuities over the three periods as a whole. For example the appearance of older curated penannular brooches and copies of earlier types in Early Medieval graves can potentially tell us about the contemporary population’s relationship with the past during this later period.
However, despite this potential, the last (and only) comprehensive survey of penannular brooches was carried out in the late 1950s by Elizabeth Fowler for her BLitt thesis. The typology that she devised remains in use today and more recent studies have been limited, generally only challenging her chronologies and assumptions about the origins of specific types. Yet since Fowler carried out her study many new penannular brooches have been discovered and recorded, largely thanks to the spate of development led excavations that took place post-PPG16 and also to the rise in popularity of metal detecting as a hobby and the formation of the Portable Antiquities Scheme.
The aim of this study, therefore, is to gather together this new evidence in order to carry out the first overall survey of the penannular brooch since Fowler’s original study. The contextual data for each brooch will be recorded where it is available in order to build up as full a picture as possible of the temporal and spatial variety in the ways that they were deposited. It is hoped that not only will a reassessment of Fowler’s original typology be achieved, but that the long chronology of the penannular brooch will also allow the investigation of some of the themes mentioned above on a much broader scale than would be achievable with a more short-lived artefact type.
 

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• Created: 13 years ago
• Created by: Daniel Pett