Archaeologia Baltica

Curonian women’s bead sets with bronze spacer plates or pectoral ornaments, headbands, headdresses made of cloth, caps adorned with metal spirals and unaccountable ware from the Viking Age and early medieval times in a lot of cases are not correctly interpreted. Some of the Curonian ornaments investigated in this article have good parallels in Livonian, Gotlandic and Scandinavian material and material from Finland. At the same time, bead sets with spacer plates both in Gotland and in Curonia were an outcome of the rivalry between Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire in designing symbols of power and prestige.