London, United Kingdom

Jewellery and Metal

Master's
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: engineering and engineering trades
Qualification: MA
Kind of studies: full-time studies
Master of Arts (MA)
University website: www.rca.ac.uk
Jewellery
Jewellery (British English) or jewelry (American English) consists of small decorative items worn for personal adornment, such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants, bracelets, and cufflinks. Jewellery may be attached to the body or the clothes, and the term is restricted to durable ornaments, excluding flowers for example. For many centuries metal, often combined with gemstones, has been the normal material for jewellery, but other materials such as shells and other plant materials may be used. It is one of the oldest type of archaeological artefact – with 100,000-year-old beads made from Nassarius shells thought to be the oldest known jewellery. The basic forms of jewellery vary between cultures but are often extremely long-lived; in European cultures the most common forms of jewellery listed above have persisted since ancient times, while other forms such as adornments for the nose or ankle, important in other cultures, are much less common.
Metal
A metal (from Greek μέταλλον métallon, "mine, quarry, metal") is a material (an element, compound, or alloy) that is typically hard when in solid state, opaque, shiny, and has good electrical and thermal conductivity. Metals are generally malleable—that is, they can be hammered or pressed permanently out of shape without breaking or cracking—as well as fusible (able to be fused or melted) and ductile (able to be drawn out into a thin wire). Around 90 of the 118 elements in the periodic table are metals; the others are nonmetals or metalloids, though elements near the boundaries of each category have been assigned variably to either (hence the lack of an exact count). Some elements appear in both metallic and non-metallic forms.
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