Marisia - Maros Megyei Múzeum Évkönyve 30/1. (2010)
Articles
130 L. Vass a) jewellery and adornment articles: hairpins, pendants, necklaces, earrings, bracelets, rings, combs; b) dress accessories: certain types of brooches; c) items related to female occupation: spinning: spindle whorls. It is to notice that almost all types of artefacts mentioned above could have had multiple functions and could have been used by both sexes. Different types of brooches, rings or pendants were usual accessories of the male costume as well. The lunulla-shaped pendants appear frequently on funerary monuments as terminals of the military apron from the Early Empire.19 Hairpins, especially those with flat heads could have been easily used as medical instruments. To reduce this possibility as much as possible, I constrained the grouping of these artefacts to distinctive types: 1) As already mentioned different types of rings were worn by men and women, therefore seal rings and those with a diameter larger than 1.70 cm were rejected, instead I focused upon simple small-sized rings. 2) As S. Coci$ in his monograph of Roman brooches in Dacia mentions,20 the majority of brooches with known findspots were recovered from military forts. Therefore I limited my sample to those types that are considered by Coci§ - judging by the iconographical evidences of the funerary monuments from Dacia - as typical female brooches. Brooches of type 11 are represented on funerary monuments associated only with female clothing. These brooches appear on monuments coming from Apulum and from Criste^ti. Brooches of type 20b3-20b4 appear on female costume on a monument from Oltenia.21 In this way I reduced the sample to only four types of brooches: Type Coci§ 8a5; Type Coci$ 11a; Type Coci$ 12b; and Type Coci§ 20b3 (Fig. 1), although it is not excluded that other types of brooches - especially those of little sized - could have been worn by women, as well. 3) The primary stage of textile work, the spinning is traditionally considered to be the most typical occupation for Roman women. Ancient sources, the iconography of funerary monuments belonging to native women have all confirmed the female character of this activity, separating from the weaving and dying processes that could have functioned in workshop conditions with the participation of men, too. Spindle whorls are the only objects from this category that survived in camps, so I limited my selection to this distinctive type of artefact.22 19 Bishop 1992, fig. 25. 20 Coci? 2008, 451, graph 2. 21 Coci$ 2008, pi. CLXXIII/la-lb; CLXXIV/ la- lb (Apulum); CLXXV/la-lb; CLXXVI/1 a- lb (Criste?ti); CLXXVIII/2 (Oltenia). 22 The association of spinning and textile working with women is a constant element in ancient sources. Lucretius mentions that processing of wool was originally made by men and undertook later by women (Lucretius, On
