Antique jewelry glossary

Welcome to our extensive antique jewelry glossary with around 1,500 jewelry related entries.If you feel you are missing an explanation, feel free to let us know and we will add it.

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Objet trouvés

Objet trouvés, French for "lost and found property". Objects sometimes worn as articles of personal adornment in the form in which they are found in nature, e.g. teeth, bones, shells, pebbles, feathers, beans, and fish vertebrae, without setting or ornamentation except a hole drilled for suspension.

Such objects have been worn in the manner of jewelry from the Paleolithic period and presumably in all regions of the world, and are still worn by remote tribes.

Some such objects have in modern times been set in mounts, especially as costume jewelry, or are worn today strung as a necklace or a bracelet, and to that extent may be embraced within the term 'jewelry'. When such an object is altered by an artist, it is called an 'objet trouvé assisté'.

From: An Illustrated Dictionary of Jewelry, autor: Harold Newman, publishers: Thames and Hudson