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Jewelry has been define in our culture as a personal ornament, such as a necklace, ring, or bracelet, made from jewels, precious metals or other substance.
The word jewellery or jewelry is derived from the word jewel, which was anglicised from the Old French "jouel" in around the 13th century. It goes all the back to the Latin word "jocale", meaning plaything. Jewelry is one of the oldest forms of body adornment; recently found 100,000 year-old Nassarius shells that were made into beads are thought to be the oldest known jewelry.
In early times jewelry was designed for more practical purposes, such as wealth storage and pinning clothes together, but in recent times it has been used almost exclusively for decoration. The first pieces of jewelry were made from natural materials, such as bone, animal teeth, shell, wood, and carved stone. jewelry was often made for people of high importance to show their status and, in many cases, they were buried with it.
Most cultures have at some point had a practice of keeping large amounts of wealth stored in the form of jewelry. Numerous cultures move wedding dowries in the form of jewelry, or create it as a means to store or display coins. Alternatively, jewelry has been used as a currency or trade good; an example being the use of slave beads.
At first, brooches and buckles were used many times as purely functional items, but evolved into decorative items as their functional requirement diminished. Jewelry can also be symbolic of group membership, as in the case of the Christian crucifix or Jewish Star of David, or of status, or the Western practice of married people wearing a wedding ring.
By wearing of amulets and devotional medals jewelry was suppose to provide protection or ward off evil by some cultures; these may take the form of symbols (such as the ankh), stones, plants, animals, body parts (such as the Khamsa), or glyphs (such as stylized versions of the Throne Verse in Islamic art).
Although artistic display has clearly been a function of jewelry from the very beginning, the other roles described above tended to take primacy. Today you will find are large assortment of jewelry books on past, present, type, construction, materials.
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