| This dissertation examines the production and use of dress pins made from skeletal materials between the 5th and 9th centuries AD in Ireland. Based on the personal examination of all curated early medieval bone and antler material in Ireland, this work establishes a formal typology of dress pins for this period, details the distribution and relative chronology of these artifacts, and compares their forms to similar dress pins found in Roman and early medieval contexts in Britain and Continental Europe. The production of bone and antler dress pins is detailed by examining the worked debris from numerous Irish sites and an overview of the bone and antler craft industry is provided. The status connotations of bone and antler artifacts is discussed and it is argued that the production of dress pins does not conform to previously held beliefs that bone and antler working were strictly low-status crafts during this period. Instead, bone and antler dress pins appear to be status markers intimately bound to the status of the animals from which the pins were constructed and thus closely linked to the agricultural and redistributive economy of early medieval Ireland. |
