gems, garnet, almandine, ancient jewelry, analytical, Carthage, Tunisia

A group of garnets discovered by chance in Carthage around 1900 has usually been interpreted as a hoard hidden by a goldsmith of the Vandal period (AD 439–534). In 2000, the Museum of Carthage, in accord with international agreements for scholarly and scientific cooperation, entrusted this assemblage to the Museum of National Archaeology (MAN) for further study at the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France (C2RMF). The typological study did indeed confirm that some of these garnets belonged to types often found in the Danubian regions and the Merovingian world of the fifth and sixth centuries. However, traceological analysis indicated that all of these gems, many of them showing signs of wear and damage, had been crudely extracted from their settings, no doubt in order to recover the precious metal from which these were made. To carry out this study, the PIXE (Particle Induced X-ray Emission) method was employed, using AGLAE (Accélérateur Grand Louvre d’Analyses Élémentaires). This confirmed that those garnets from Carthage which belonged to Migration Period types shared the same chemical composition and that they came from India and Sri Lanka. Since other garnets in the assemblage were of diverse types, the hypothesis that this was a goldsmith’s hoard from the Vandal period seems implausible. Given the evidence that these stones had been so carelessly removed from their settings, and the presence among them of a rose-cut garnet (a technique no older than the 16th century), it is more likely that the collection was made up of jewelry (probably stolen) of various epochs brought together in order to recover precious metals. All the same, one wonders how to explain the presence, in Carthage, of a series of garnets which are usually found ornamenting cloisonné objects like sword hilts, belt buckles, or brooches not in North Africa but along the Danube and in Merovingian regions further west in the late 5th and 6th centuries.