S. Marzinzik : Early Anglo-Saxon belt buckles (Late Fifth Century to Early Eighth Century AD). Their Classification and Context. British Archaeological Reports, British Series 357, Oxford 2003

This corpus of 1379 buckles looks at a type of artefact not previously studied systematically. It is an Oxford D. Phil. Thesis, with classification, discussion, catalogue and drawings. Most users will want the last, as a quick guide to identification, and they can use the book in this way once the route from illustration back to type-list and then forward to cemetery has been found, though their time would have been saved if the data in the type-list had been put in the illustration captions, where there is quite enough space.

The basic classification is two-fold, buckles without (I) and with (II) a plate, which can be integrally cast, hinged or folded sheet — the last having a disturbing ability to turn themselves into a I by divorce. The shape of the frame (I was told so long ago that I have forgotten the reason that buckles have frames, not loops, but that is also Geoff Egan’s terminology for London) then produces twelve Typegroups in Class I and twenty-six in Class II : many Typegroups have characteristics distinctive enough to merit being subgroups. Anyone who has tried to construct this sort of categorisation, as I once did with pins, will be very sympathetic to the problem of trying to make it both comprehensive and meaningful, but I would have expected the double-tongue buckles studied by Helen Geake in Medieval Archaeology 38 (1994), 164-6 to have merited some sort of special subtyping.

Much of Marzinzik’s discussion is a search for useful associations of any one Typegroup with any one geographical area, gender, status group or overseas connection. Probably unsurprisingly, all but the most exotic —and therefore the best-known— defy anything clear-cut. Indeed, I thought that the mist interesting point related to the materials rather than to the typology. Marzinzik has established that the majority of silver or gilt buckles are in the south coast zone ; this is not a matter of wealth, as so many gilt buckles are found inland, so must show a different concept of the importance of the buckle, and with it presumably the belt, as a status indicator.

Discussion of ideas like that, and of particular brooches, can only be found by direct searching of the opening chapters, as there is no index, a failing that will reduce the amount of use that the book will get. The small font size did not make me eager to read those chapters straight through, and lines like « The latest grave is Morning Thorpe 367B, with a group 6 shield boss and an E2/E2 spearhead » are perfectly comprehensible but nevertheless make heavy going. There are some useful comparisons with continental examples, and I would like to have had more on why some types are found less than others, if necessary in lieu or rather dutiful sections on energy expenditure and the depths in the ground in which buckles have been found. The late sixth century is seen a something of a turning-point, with less copying and more refashioning into something more English than north Germanic / Frankish, which is consistant with the fading out of uch brooches as those in John Hine’s great Corpus of Square-Headed Brooches — sorry, that should have been Corpus of Square-Head Brooches— and adoption of new Mediterranean modes. Here Marzinzik does not agree with Helen Geake that seventh-century modes were inspired directly from Byzantium and by adoption from late Roman Britain, but views them as mediated through Francia, which would probably be the consensus view.

The catalogue illustrations are clear enough for use, and there are two useful reproductions of continental sequences, one of which has either been over-inked or over-reduced. Reproductions of manuscript illuminations and other reprensentations and recinstructions are also useful.

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