A METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING JEWELRY AS HERITAGE AND THE EMBODIED RITUAL OF CRAFT IN LATE STAGE CAPITALISM AT THE END OF EMPIRE

Ruby Rodriguez, PhD · Qualitative research · Material culture · Luxury semiotics

Heritage is not nostalgia. It is navigation...

Sovereignty & Subjugation: How Jewelry Constructs and Destroys Power

The first in a three-part series on the semiotics of adornment. The same materials that construct a queen's authority — diamonds, gold — can be repurposed by the victor to narrate her erasure. Marie Antoinette and Queen Zenobia as case studies in the perversion of ornament.

The Petrified Divine: Ornament, Theology, and the Sacred Body in Greco-Roman and South Asian Sculpture

The second in a three-part series on the semiotics of adornment. When a goddess is carved in stone, her jewelry is theology — and the body it adorns is an argument. This study compares two sculptural traditions — one where a single ornament concentrates divine desire on a vulnerable, approachable body, one where jewelry is not worn but structural, equipping a body for cosmic battle — and what the difference reveals about power, beauty, and the theology of the sacred feminine.

Jewelry as Eschatological Currency in the Royal Tombs of Ur and the Regolini-Galassi Tomb

The third and final of a three-part series on the semiotics of adornment. Jewelry buried with the dead is not sentimental — it is strategic. This study examines two burial hoards across two unconnected civilizations to identify the material logic of funerary adornment: gold as biological proxy, carnelian as thermal metaphysics, lapis lazuli as a declaration of rank legible to the gods.