NARRATOR: Melanie Holcomb is a curator specializing in western medieval art at The Metropolitan Museum:

MELANIE HOLCOMB: We don’t think very much about belt buckles in modern times. But in the fifth through the eighth century, the belt buckle was a field for elaborate decoration and a very visible symbol of rank and status. This is a belt buckle that was created for a Visigothic woman. The Visigoths were an eastern tribe who moved west and ultimately settled in Spain, living amongst the Romans there. They were particularly fine craftsmen of buckles for women.

This piece uses many many garnets to cover most of the buckle. It’s very red. But the borders are made of a very rare and precious stone, lapus lazuli, and on each of the corners, to give that splash of white, is probably cuttlefish bone.

Beautiful gemstones interplay to give it a very spectacular, very colorful look. And again, it would have been obvious to a viewer that this is a woman of high rank.

NARRATOR: The Visigoths, one of the many Germanic groups from the East who were displaced by the advances of the Hun in the late fourth century, had settled in Spain by the late fifth century. Their kingdom, which lasted over two hundred years, proved to be one of the most powerful and culturally sophisticated in the West.