It was a single piece of bronze wire coiled at one end as a spring, with a point that engaged a guard of sheet bronze.
With many variants it spread rapidly around the Mediterranean, especially in Greek lands. For male and female wearers it is thought to have been a badge of both worldly and spiritual privilege. Around B.
In the Middle Ages, in the West, the luxury fibula resumed its role as an upper-class ornament. The nineteenth-century safety pin may have been a conscious classical revival, influenced by increasing museum display of and publication of articles on ancient fibulae. The first U. Only beginning in the late s did other inventors add the guard that protected the wearer fully. Crucially, they also developed machinery for automating the production of the pins.
By , American factories alone were making over 1. The maverick economist Thorstein Veblen affixed his watch to his clothing with a safety pin to show his indifference to conspicuous consumption-a gesture of reverse snobbery later followed more drastically by the punk movement's use of safety pins as piercing jewelry from the s onward.
The spread of disposable diapers with snap fasteners after World War II reduced the role of safety pins in the household, or rather redefined safety as protection from embarrassment by malfunctioning apparel. On the negative side, the fasteners' reassuring name conceals their real hazards to unsupervised children, who swallow them all too often.
Extracting open safety pins requires special instruments first developed over one hundred years ago, and exceptional medical skill. This sewing tool—with a rich historical and cultural significance—is commonplace in our studio and used for everything from basic sewing functions to attaching hangtags to our garments.
Learn more below about the basic types of safety pins and their uses. Safety pins sometimes called Skirt or Kilt pins are a great alternative to the straight pin when a project is going to be moved around a lot.
The curved shape of this pin allows the pin to pass through many layers of fabric and makes it a good basting tool—especially in quilting or where multiple layers of fabric are in use. This safety pin has a small bump in the middle that can be used to hold a button in place on a garment. Sometimes used with delicate or specialty buttons so they can be removed for washing and cleaning.
Second image: Left: Fibula ca. Your email address will not be published. A countless variety of shapes, types, and sizes were created, for both men and women. Fibulae from every area of the ancient world where they were employed, especially Italy and Europe, exhibit an amazing number of types which are both utilitarian and decorative.
Indeed, some fibulae may have been valued primarily as jewelry. This is the impression one gets after examining, for example, such elaborate specimens as Etruscan gold fibulae or bronze fibulae from Boeotia in Greece.
A further decorative use of fibulae is to be seen on some of the belt buckles found at Ankara, Gordion, Ephesus, and Chios. Here fibulae arcs of different types served as clasps for the belt and demonstrate that the fibula shape itself was considered aesthetic enough to function other than as a safety pin. A more fascinating use of fibulae may be observed, particularly in the Greek regions where archaeologists have recognized for some time that at many but possibly not all sanctuaries, fibulae played a major role as votive gifts to gods and goddesses This votive role is shown both by the large number of fibulae found at sanctuaries and by ancient literary and epigraphical records.
For example, at a sanctuary on the island of Rhodes about sixteen hundred fibulae were found in votive deposits, and at least one sanctuary deposit, that at Ephesus, contained pieces of thin gold and silver foil cut into the form of fibulae.
These simulacra could not possibly have been worn and were made only for the purpose of dedication. Furthermore, at Nimrud in Assyria, a limestone plaque was found on which was depicted a female demon or deity surrounded by objects, one of which appears to be a fibula.
If these objects were votive gifts to the deity, as some scholars suggest, then we can assume that Assyrians as well as Greeks recognized fibulae as having some votive value. It is tempting to consider the possibility that if fibulae had some special value in sanctuaries, they may also have had some special value in a tomb where the dead person would soon come into contact with his gods. We know that the dead as well as the living wore fibulae.
In fact, there is evidence that some dead persons wore a greater quantity of fibulae than was normal in daily dress. This difference becomes obvious when one examines the number of fibulae worn by people represented on sculpture, reliefs, or painted vases, and compares them to the number of fibulae often found associated with burials.
In the former circumstances only a few fibulae, sometimes only one, are evident, whereas in the burials many more are often found.
Thus the man buried under the big tumulus at Gordion was laid to rest with thirty-seven fibulae about his body and a bad containing fibulae was placed near his bier. A child of three or four years found in an early Roman cemetery had nine fibulae placed on her body. There are many other examples to indicate that more fibulae were thought necessary to decorate a dead person than were worn during his lifetime.
Evidently one had to be excessively well dressed for the entry into the other world. These various discoveries and their interpretations give us knowledge and insights about the use of a small object, the fibula, in antiquity.
But fibulae, like pottery, tell the archaeologist more than just how they were used by the ancients. A fibula, like a potsherd, can indicate to an archaeologist its date and area of manufacture almost as well as if there had been an identifying label attached. This information is important in supplying a date for the particular level or tomb where the fibula is found. It may also yield valuable information about the cultural relations of a people whose local fibulae are found in a foreign land as a trade item.
Fibulae can be used for dating and tracing trade connections because, once different peoples learned about them, they developed them stylistically to suit their own cultural and aesthetic needs.
Thus the extraordinarily elaborate development of fibulae in Italy was quite different from that in Greece, the country from which we have suggested the Italians originally received the fibula. And when the use of the fibula spread east from Greece through the islands to Cyprus and the Near East, an entirely different series of fibula types came into existence. Likewise when the Phrygians learned about fibulae from the Aegean area and from Cyprus and introduced them into Anatolia in the latter part of the eighth century B.
Those from the expedition to Nippur have only recently been cleaned by Eric Parkinson, and are illustrated here for the first time. For example, leech-shaped fibulae like those shown here from a tomb at Narce, Italy, are found in both Italy and Greece and archaeologists argue about their original home; fortunately this problem is not too common.
We have already observed the role played by fibulae in regard to possible movements of people into Greece. Two other examples of the role of fibulae come from University Museum expeditions, and further illustrate their importance.
Since the city represented by Period III had been abandoned and much eroded, very little was found besides some pottery, which could not be easily dated. The fibula found, however, was of a type known from the ruins of the ancient Urartean fortress of Karmir Blur in modern Armenia , which was destroyed about B. This fibula type has one end of the pin wrapped around the arc end opposite the catch and it does not form a spring.
In the University Museum collection there is a similar type of fibula but with a different arc shape purchased in Armenia at the turn of the century and illustrated now for the first time.
0コメント