The Rosette Fibulas and the Social Strategies of the Late Roman Iron Age

Abstract

During 2018-2022, the North Jutland Museums excavated large parts of one of three closely located burial grounds by the farm Grønhøjgård southeast of Aalborg, Northern Jutland. Both the graves, their content, and the general character of the site stand out from the region's rich record of contemporary burial grounds, and the rich and varied find material from the site forms the picture of a sacral site without precise parallels from Iron Age Denmark. Among the finds from the burial ground are ten rosette fibulas. The rosette fibulas, found in good numbers in many regions across Denmark, are everywhere else only represented by one-four copies at the individual find locations. This paper presents the fibulas from the Grønhøjgård burial ground and discusses the social significance of the rosette fibula. It is argued that the rosette fibulas may be viewed as a tool of communication that conveyed symbolic meaning at several levels and thus served multiple purposes in a Late Roman social landscape where the roles of some highborn women were changing markedly.