Slavic bow fibulae? Werner's class I D revisited
Slavic bow fibulae? Werner's class I D revisited

Summary/Abstract: In 1988, the Hungarian National Museum of History acquired through donation a copper-alloy bow fibula that had been found, presumably with a female skeleton, in a grave accidentally excavated some twenty meters to the southeast from the Early Avar cemetery on Pusztadombi Street on the northern outskirts of Budapest. Although published soon after that, the Budapest fibula was ostensibly ignored by Uwe Fiedler in his catalogue of “Slavic” bow fibulae to be supposedly associated with a significant presence of the Slavs within the Avar qaganate at a very early date. Fiedler’s interpretation was in turn influenced by Joachim Werner, who produced the first classification of bow fibulae found in Eastern Europe and attached the label “Slavic” to this class of artifacts. Werner divided his corpus into two classes (I and II), further subdivided on the basis of presumably different terminal lobes, shaped in the form of either a human face (“mask”) or an animal head. The size and detailed ornamentation of the Budapest fibula, including the prominent pair of bird heads on either side of the bow, make it relatively easy to include it into Werner’-Daumen” group. At the time his influential study of “Slavic” bow fibulae was published, Werner only knew five specimens of that class, two of which (Fig. 27.60 and Fig. 28.62) had been found in northeastern Poland. Two other brooches found in that region (Fig. 27.55 and Fig. 28.73) made up his class I E, while the Bucharest-Damaroaia and Kaniv Broches (Fig. 29.11 and Fig. 29.28) were classified as I K specimens.

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