Life in the 7^th and 8^th centuries was not the same across Slovenia. In the east, along the valley of the River Mura flowing at the edge of the Pannonian Plain, archaeological evidence suggests that the Slavs ushered in a new era by inhabiting the area relatively densely. In the west, life went on roughly as before; in Byzantine Istria the coastal towns of Capris (present-day Koper) and Piranon (Piran) show the continuing presence of the Roman population, while the graves unearthed along the River Soča prove the existence of garrisons stationed in the frontier zone of Langobard Italy well into the 7^thcentury.

The situation in central Slovenia is less clear. At Bled, a Slavic migratory settlement below the abandoned Roman hilltop settlement was probably  already established by the end of the 7^th, but certainly in the 8^th century; these Slavs buried their dead next to those of the Romans.  

The jewellery from the sites in the Gorenjska region includes numerous bronze plate brooches with embossed decoration (1-3, 5). An iconographically significant brooch is one found at Brdo, with a depiction of a centaur-archer (3). Brooches of similar production manner and decoration were widespread in the second half of the 7th and the early 8th century along the Upper Danube and in the Rhineland. The Late Antique legacy of the Romans remained alive among the inhabitants of the early medieval Carniola in the form of a cast bronze brooch in the shape of an animal licking her young, found at Smokuč (4).

The gilded copper brooch from Brdo in Bled, depicting the head of a ruler within a border of beaded rings (6), is much later in date: it is a Carolingian product of the 9^th century.

Knific, Timotej in Nabergoj, Tomaž, 2016: Medieval Stories from the Crossroads, Ljubljana, Fig. 78, pp. 66-75.