Freshwater Pearl and Copper Wrist Coil ("River-Coil Bracelet")

This bracelet represents one of the more intact examples of common-grade Vorrashi personal ornament recovered from the mid-period occupation layer at Sovari Bend, and its very ordinariness is precisely what makes it analytically valuable. Elite Vorrashi jewelry — the pearl-laden ceremonial collars documented in the Kethari-era tribute inventories preserved on Ashenmere tablets — is better represented in institutional collections. Everyday wrist ornaments of this type, worn by non-specialist community members, are comparatively underrepresented, making this specimen a useful point of reference for assessing craft production at non-elite levels. The spiral coil form demands immediate attention in any motif analysis. The Vorrashi spiral motif, reconstructed from Kethari artistic borrowings and from the reed-boat carvings at the Sovari site, consistently encodes the concept of the river eddy — the rotating, accumulating water associated in reconstructed Vorrashi oral tradition with the presence of vo (river spirit). That a piece of common daily wear employs this form rather than a simpler bangle or ring shape suggests the motif carried meaning beyond ceremonial contexts, permeating even mundane material culture. This is consistent with the Vorrashi's apparent lack of sharp boundaries between sacred and quotidian practice, a characteristic noted by Orrenden (2021) in her survey of Vorrashi-adjacent riverine cultures. The incised flowing water lines along the outer ribbon face are executed with competent but non-specialist hand pressure — the groove depth varies between 0.3mm and 0.7mm across the length, and two lines drift slightly off-parallel near the terminal taper. This is consistent with household-level craft production rather than workshop specialization, supporting the hypothesis that basic copper-working skills were broadly distributed within Vorrashi communities rather than guild-restricted. The copper itself has been cold-hammered to its ribbon shape; metallurgical spot analysis (XRF, conducted 2024) indicates a copper purity of approximately 97.3%, with trace arsenic levels typical of river-deposit copper sources in the Ashenmere basin. The pearl-setting technique — cup depressions formed in the copper and sealed with clay adhesive — is technically modest compared to the wire-wrapped settings documented on higher-status Vorrashi pieces, but it is functionally effective, as the survival of two intact pearls across three millennia demonstrates. The pearl-in-spiral motif, one of the three primary Vorrashi visual vocabulary elements, is invoked here in compressed form: the coil body provides the spiral, and the pearls are positioned within it, literalizing the motif at a small scale. Whether this was consciously symbolic or simply conventional practice cannot be determined from a single specimen, but the consistency of pearl placement at regular intervals rather than clustered or random positioning implies a learned compositional rule. Dating is established by stratigraphic context (Layer IV at Sovari Bend, correlated with the mid-Vorrashi occupation horizon) and supported by typological comparison with copper coil fragments recovered at the Melanu tributary site, for which a calibrated AMS date of 2940 ± 60 BCE has been published (Tarves & Ikolani, 2019). The clay adhesive compound has not been independently dated but is chemically consistent with other Sovari Layer IV organic residues. No Kethari bronze alloys are present in this piece, placing it confidently within the pre-absorption period, before Kethari kiln technology and bronze tools entered the Vorrashi material repertoire.