Fragments of jewelry and ingots, manufactured in North Africa, found at Salcombe Cannon Site, Devon, England. Gold, smallest 2 x 1.2 cm; largest 3 x 2.1 cm. The British Museum, London, England, 1999,1207.449, .450, .460, .461, .465, .470, and .474. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

In 1992 a shipwreck was discovered of the coast of Devon, England. The ship sank in the mid-seventeenth century, and its cargo included more than four hundred gold coins, most of them minted in Morocco, as well as North African gold ingots and jewelry. Mostly worn and broken, these gold objects were on their way to be melted down and repurposed by the British Crown. Today, these rare items provide a glimpse into late medieval North African goldwork. The fragment of a clasp is among the earliest surviving examples of a form, the fibula, that has become an iconic symbol of Amazigh (Berber) jewelry.