Small bodies in a big world: anthropo-ornithomorphic Iron Age pendants from Caput Adriae

Sa？etak Pendants have always had an exceptionally important role in man’s perception and aesthetics. As carriers of information, i.e. as the mediums of a certain metaphoric messages, they are mostly interpreted in the tradition of developed communicational relations in the value systems of different cultural and social orders. At the end of the Early Iron Age, anthropo-ornithomorphic pendants from the upper Adriatic cultural region (Caput Adriae), and the attached hinterland, were undoubtedly accessible signs, as well as symbols. This paper discusses their typological, stylistic and chronological classification in detail, assessing available archaeological and cultural contexts from the wider European area. Depending on the circumstances, some of their roles are defined, and their use was presented in dynamic and ambivalent ideological-semantic structures. The pendants were iconographically and symbolically interpreted based on the artistic concept of sign–symbol. It was concluded that these “small bodies”, as a metaphor for the androgynous with the idea of apotropaic and prophylactic, were momentarily visually (nonverbally) understandable, (cognitively) recognizable, and (culturally) widely accepted in the “big world” as correspondents in the indirect transfer of intricate and complex interrelationships between people and societies