Oggetti identitari? Le borchie/bottone in bronzo dell’età del Ferro ligure. Tipologia, cronologia, distribuzione, contesti

Identity objects? Bronze studs/butt ons from the Ligurian Iron Age: typology, chronology, distribution, contexts - The paper provides an updated overview on the problem of the Late Iron Age bronze studs/ buttons characteristic of the Ligurian area. These objects are distributed over a vast territory which includes the present-day Regions of Liguria, part of Emilia, Tuscany and Piedmont. These objects have been found mainly in funerary contexts. However, they have been also recovered in settlements or as sporadic objects. The present article is the first step to establish a comprehensive corpus of funnel and conical bronze studs/buttons by presenting unpublished evidence and recovering information dispersed in publications from the last century. Furthermore, recent findings and 14C dating of contexts associated with these objects now allow us to better specify their chrono-typology and draw more precise boundaries of a territory where the bronze studs/buttons have been found. They probably constituted an identity symbol for the populations that used them. Pending more extensive archaeometallurgical investigations on the composition of the alloy to identify the possible origin of the raw materials, preliminary data on production technology are presented which are useful for evaluating manufacturing traditions.