Personal ornaments at Hasanlu, Iran
Personal ornaments at Hasanlu, Iran

Summary/Abstract: The site of Hasanlu, located in northwestern Iran, reached the height of its prosperity in Period IV b (approximately 1050–800 BC), a short-lived zenith that ended abruptly with destruction about 800 BC. Our research encompasses all of the more than two 2000 personal ornaments retrieved from Hasanlu, from the Middle Bronze through the Iron Age, and from a wide range of contexts, including the cemetery on the Low Mound, and the bodies of victims of the destruction of the elite buildings on the citadel, and in storerooms in these buildings. These unusual contexts provide a unique opportunity to compare ornaments found in burials with those worn in daily life, and to assess the extent to which they were deemed valuable within this society. Michelle Marcus’s published work on issues of adornment and dress at Hasanlu has been criticized and indeed was limited by a site-wide publication approach that focused on specific materials and artifact classes in advance of a clear understanding of the complex archaeological contexts. Now that the final excavation reports are in preparation, the authors were able to integrate newer scientific research and ground their analysis of personal ornaments in a broader understanding of the site. Some conclusions reached in earlier scholarship have now been revised, but in other cases, the conclusions drawn by Marcus in her work on the women’s burial assemblages in particular have been corroborated, namely that at Hasanlu personal adornment played a role in the construction and communication of a gendered, militarized identity that emerged in Period IV b, and indeed have been extended to include adornment in men’s graves as well.

• Details
• Contents