Technical and decorative crafting of woman's jewelry of the Sayan-Altai Turkic peoples in the late XIX early XX century

Until the mid-twentieth century in the traditional Sayan-Altai Turks' culture, craftsmen in metalworking and textile decorations used stable technical and decorative techniques, which led to the stylistic similarity of their products and demonstrated the uniqueness of local traditions. Despite the diversity of traditional woman's jewelry of the Sayan-Altai Turks one can trace common features of technical and artistic techniques of performance typical form, composition, methods of ornamentation. Technique and technology are the basis of various kinds of arts and crafts. They largely determine the artistic image of the object. Traditionally, woman's adornments complex of Sayan-Altai Turks was associated with the artistic metalworking. In the metalworking of Siberian Turks silver was the leading material, but bronze, copper, tin and silver alloy, lead, and later aluminum was also used. Among the techniques the most common one was casting. Also used were techniques of forging, notches, inlay, applique, profiling, riveting, and coinage. For inlay use colored semi-precious stones and glass. In the design of things the people of southern Siberia widely used ornaments that enclosed artistic, symbolic and magical meanings. The underlying variation of the ornament was, by researchers' definition, «Steppe», where the primary means of expression were floral ornaments with a tendency toward geometrization and the subordinate role of zoomorphic and other images. Identification of different layers in a complex of traditional women's adornments of the Turkic peoples of the Sayan-Altai demonstrates the unity of the canonical and creative mobility. In the decorative variety of Turks Sayan-Altai women's jewelry lies enormous creativity and prospects for development of jewelry in general.

Keywords

Authors

References