gems, glyptic, engraved gems, agate, cameo, intaglio, Rome, Roman gems, history of gemology, chromian chalcedony intaglios, including the Wroxeter Lion examined and published by Hutchinson

The writer of this note is aware that his interests are often regarded as art-historical by archaeologists and as archaeological by art historians. This sense of being wedged between disciplines is one that most students of jewellery (and especially of ancient jewellery) will share. Like other connoisseurs, the jewellery historian will always wish to explore the aesthetic values of the objects he studies and the techniques of the craftsman. He will also want to know something of the context in which an item of jewellery was used, and, as far as Antiquity is concerned, this requires a close attention to field archaeology and to stratigraphy. However disconcerting the position of the archaeologist-art historian may seem within the structure of the British academic scene, it certainly has its strengths in an attempt to endow the past with significance. Reynold Higgins has demonstrated this in his important work on gold jewellery, for instance in his account of the Aegina Treasure in the British Museum (R. Higgins, The Aegina Treasure. An Archaeological Mystery, British Museum, London 1979). One of the uses of gold was in order to manufacture rings which were frequently employed for sealing. I hope that Dr Higgins will excuse me if I take a tangential approach to his particular specialism and look not at metal jewellery but at stones associated with it. Engraved gems can, in part, reveal their histories in their devices. Their intrinsic meaning is proclaimed, for instance, in images of deities (worship), heroes (veneration), lucky devices and love-charms. For the many gems without provenance in old collections and, alas, others still being found by treasure-hunters who remove them from where they have lain for some two millennia without record, this is as far as we can go. However, many stones do, fortunately, have geographical and even stratigraphical contexts, and these can be very useful in telling us about the sort of people who wore signet-rings, their choice of devices and even the age of the ring stones they owned.