Adornment Atlas
How we cite sources
Every Ornament Has a History. Keeping that promise means being explicit about what kind of statement you are reading — on every page, not in a disclaimer at the foot.
Two separate questions
Two things get confused constantly. The first is what kind of record the source is. The second is what kind of statement we are making. They are different axes, and we track them separately.
Source tier — how reliable is the record itself?
- Tier 1
Excavation reports and scientific analysis
Published records of a controlled excavation, or instrumental analysis of materials. Typically includes burial context and associated finds.
- Tier 2
Museum records and official catalogues
An institution’s own documentation of an object: accession number, date, medium, dimensions, and the attribution that institution makes.
- Tier 3
Academic books and peer-reviewed articles
Argument-driven scholarship. Often the only place where form, technique and meaning are discussed — and where scholars disagree.
- Tier 4
Exhibition texts and secondary summaries
Useful for orientation, unreliable as evidence. Claims resting only on this tier are treated as leads, not facts.
A high tier does not make everything inside it true. An excavation report can contain a cautious guess about whose grave it was. The tier describes the container, not the contents.
Evidence level — what kind of statement is this?
When sources disagree
We keep both. We do not average them, pick the newer one, or pick the one that fits a nicer story. Both statements appear on the object page, each with its own source and date, and the disagreement is labelled.
Example — the term buyao
One reading restricts buyao to a specific early-medieval court form recorded in ritual texts. Another uses it more broadly for any hairpin with a dangling element. Both are current in the literature. Our concept page states both, and attributes each, rather than declaring one correct.
Images
Every image carries its source, licence and credit. Where an institution permits viewing but not commercial reuse, we link to their record instead of reproducing the image. That is why some object pages show a text panel where you might expect a photograph — the record exists, the rights do not.
We do not remove watermarks, scrape paywalled resources, or take images from search engines and social media.
What we do not claim
- That an object was worn by a named person, unless a source establishes it.
- That a motif “means” something, without saying who argued it and on what basis.
- That a modern piece reproduces an ancient one. Contemporary work is labelled as such.
- That a museum attribution is final. Attributions change; we record which one we cite.
- Completeness. A subject with no evidence is shown as undocumented, not filled in.
Corrections
If we get something wrong, we want to fix it and say that we did. Write to us with the page and the source. Statements are revised rather than deleted, so the earlier version remains traceable.