Adorned with everything from exotic bird plumes, to entire fruit baskets, to miniature barnyard animals, women’s early twentieth-century hat fashions butted heads with the sheer logistics of film screen visibility. Perhaps no other visual or physical obstruction posed a greater annoyance to 1910s motion-picture spectators than the woman’s hat. The shifts in the material culture evidenced in the Period IVb burials are the record of local, dynamic, and gender specific attempts to negotiate status and identity at the site, in an era of internal unease. These new elements can be interpreted as representing an ideological shift towards militarization at the site, but I will argue that the nature of these objects and the contexts in which they are found demand a methodological approach that looks more closely at the interplay between human choices and cultural norms, in the period leading up to Hasanlu’s catastrophic destruction. 800 BCE) evidence heightened gender differentiation, an influx of artifact types from regions to the north, and the introduction of military equipment and militaristic ornaments to a range of distinct, elite burial assemblages. 1050 BCE) and the catastrophic destruction (ca. A careful analysis of the entire cemetery shows that, compared to earlier burials at the site, the artifacts and ornaments in burials dating between an earlier destruction (ca. While certainly subjected to the actions of these larger scale entities, material and visual culture of Hasanlu cannot be understood through the application of the same theoretical and methodological approaches that illuminate the artistic and cultural production of hegemonic states. A small site situated beyond the limits of the Assyrian Empire and in the path of the advancing Urartian kingdom, Hasanlu was caught in, and ultimately lost to, the currents of regional conflicts by around 800 BCE. This article explores the role played by personal ornaments in the performance of gender, and in the construction and differentiation of gendered identities, in the early Iron Age (Period IVb) burials at Hasanlu, a site in Northwestern Iran. The political dynamics of an era also influences the ways in which members of all gender present themselves (and are represented) in the public sphere. Yet, the interpretation of specific classes of artifacts related to marital (and extramarital) practices can provide a possible reconstruction of the social lives of those that used them. For instance, because they are seen as taboo, sexual relations are often kept under cover. Likewise, there are important issues taking place both within the home and in wider society that are not openly addressed in newspapers, novels, or governmental records. These are topics not regularly discussed in the historical record and, as such, are explored through historical archaeology instead. The objects found in their places of work or near the households in which they lived can help illuminate their daily concerns and affairs. The study of material culture regularly provides insight into the lives of working-class and ethnically diverse people, groups for whom documentary information is often found lacking.
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