jewelry

Jewellery (or jewelry in American English) consists of decorative items worn for personal adornment such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants, bracelets, and cufflinks. Jewellery may be attached to the body or the clothes. From a Western perspective, the term is restricted to durable ornaments, excluding flowers for example. For many centuries, metals such as gold and silver, often combined with gemstones, has been the normal material for jewellery. Other materials such as glass, shells, or wood may also be used.

Jewellery is one of the oldest types of archaeological artefact – with 100,000-year-old beads made from Nassarius shells thought to be the oldest known jewellery. The basic forms of jewellery vary between cultures but are often extremely long-lived; in European cultures the most common forms of jewellery listed above have persisted since ancient times, while other forms such as adornments for the nose or ankle, important in other cultures, are much less common.