THE JÄGALA FIBULA REVISITED, OR REMARKS ON WERNER’S CLASS II D

Abstract

Half a century ago, Harri Moora was convinced that the Iron Age stronghold at Jagala, in northern Estonia, was still occupied in the seventh century, because of a fibula accidentally found by Erik Laid on that site in 1939 (Moora 1955, 53; Johanson & Veldi 2005, 30). Moora dated the fibula on the basis of analogies from Ukraine, without however citing Joachim Werner's influential paper on Slavic bow fibulae, which had been published just a few years before his own work (Werner 1950). He must have been struck by the great resemblance between the Jagala fibula (Fig. 1: 9) and other specimens, which Werner had assigned to his class II D (fibulae with bird-heads and circle-and-dot decoration; Werner 1950, 161 f.). (1) There are now 45 specimens known for that class, 26 (58 percent) of which have been found on the territory of present-day Ukraine, outside Crimea. (2) It is therefore time to re-examine Moora's premises in the light of the new finds and re-evaluate his conclusion regarding the northernmost find of Werner's Slavic fibulae. (3) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Introduction For his classification, Werner relied on visual, mostly intuitive criteria, of which he named only two: the bird-head headplate crown and the circle-and-dot decoration on both head- and footplate. He did not pay any attention to differences in size. For example, the fibula from grave 28 in Suuk Su (Fig. 2: 31) was published side by side with that from Pastyrs'ke (Fig. 2: 24), but appears considerably smaller, although the two artefacts are almost of the same size (Werner 1950, pl. 40: 31 and 33). By contrast, in her recent study, Vlasta Rodinkova distinguished between large fibulae with rather realistically designed bird heads in the headplate crown (such as those found in grave 28 in Suuk Su or in Smorodino, Fig. 2: 29 and 31) and shorter specimens with stylized bird heads (such as those from Kerch' and burial chamber 36 in Luchistoe, Figs 1: 10 and 2: 22). According to Rodinkova, specimens of the second group were imitations of the larger and more elaborate fibulae. (4) She also noticed that some fibulae of her second group have a larger number of bird-heads (as many as eight in the case of the Kuz'minki fibula, Fig. 2: 21) than fibulae of the first group (e.g., Smorodino and an unknown location in the Middle Dnieper region, both with only five bird heads, Fig. 2: 29 and Fig. 3: 39). However, Rodinkova did not notice that the headplate crowns with five bird heads are themselves imitations of bow fibulae from the Danube region dated to the sixth century, such as that from the Fleissig collection of the National Museum of History in Budapest or the fragment from Orlea, which Joachim Werner treated as a specimen of his class I A (Werner 1950, 151 and pl. 27: 3; Csallany 1961, pl. 215: 6; Teodor 1992, 142 and fig. 7: 2). (5) It is perhaps worth mentioning that a fibula from Nea Anchialos (Greece), which belongs to Werner's class I B, has a crown of seven equal, highly stylized bird heads very similar to those on the Orlea fibula or on the specimen from the Fleissig collection (Curta 1994, 242; 2005, 135). Bird-head crowns on the headplate also appear on other fibulae, such as the pair from grave 87 in Suuk Su (Korzukhina 1996, 424 and 702, pl. 112: 3, 4), which display a rectangle with reticulated decoration in the middle of the foot-plate-a typical feature of Werner's class II B (Curta 2009). Despite Werner and Rodinkova's claims to the contrary, bird-head crowns are therefore not the exclusive feature of class II D. [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] [FIGURE 3 OMITTED] At a close examination that class contains five variants of headplate (1A-E) and five of footplate (2A-E); four variants of bow (3A-D); three variants of bird+head crowns (4A-C); and six variants of terminal lobes (5A-F) (Figs 4-5). As each one of those variables appears to be independent from the others, the traditional classifications employed by Joachim Werner and Vlasta Rodinkova failed to account for the whole range of variability within the class, which explains the occasional inclusion of specimens from very different classes. …