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. From a western perspective, 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.
Crown jewels
The Honours, or 'crown jewels', including the Stone of Scone, are kept in Edinburgh Castle. They are the oldest surviving crown jewels in the United Kingdom. The crown dates from at least 1540 and the sceptre and the sword were gifts by Pope Alexander VI and Pope Julius II respectively to the King of Scotland in the 15th and 16th centuries. They were hidden during the Interregnum. The Honours of Scotland were almost forgotten following their last use at the coronation of Charles II in 1651 until they were discovered in a chest inside Edinburgh Castle in the early 19th century.