gems, ancient gemology, ancient jewelry, Middle Ages, jewelry testing, jewelry analysis, garnet, pyrope, pyrope-almandine, rhodolite, Cr-pyrope, chrome pyrope, Bohemia, Merovingian, garnet origins, Eastern Europe, Africa, Sri Lanka

Proton-particle induced X-ray emission (p-PIXE) analyses were conducted on cloisonné jewelry from a necropolis excavated in 1987 at Louvres, north of Paris, dating to the Early Middle Ages (fifth to sixth centuries). Stylistic analysis suggests the jewelry may have belonged to individuals within the close entourage of Childeric I or Clovis I, the Frankish kings who founded the French monarchy. The analyses reveal that all red cloisonnés in the treasure are garnets of three types: rhodolite (type I), pyrope (type II), and Cr-rich pyrope (type III), all with moderate to high Mg contents (40–70 mol% pyrope). Notably, common almandine garnets were absent. Type III garnets likely originated from the Podsedice area in Bohemia (Czech Republic), while types I and II probably came from granulite terrains—rare in the ancient world—with India-Sri Lanka, Central Europe, and Scandinavia as the most probable sources, though these cannot be more precisely determined. The findings highlight the diversity of raw material sources for Merovingian cloisonnés. The most aristocratic burials contained the geologically rarest garnets (those richest in pyrope), which may indicate a sophisticated understanding among the Franks of the value of gem garnets—one more in line with Arab gemological writings from the fifth to ninth centuries than with Roman lapidaries from the first to seventh centuries.