Gender and Jewelry at Hasanlu

By: Megan Cifarelli

How do we show others who we are? This problem was as present in antiquity as it is today. As an art historian, I’m particularly interested in the role that dress and personal adornment have played in the creation and expression of gendered identities in the past. These artifacts can be very eloquent, and because they are worn on the body itself, they provide an important point of intersection between the physical body and cultural representations. I am currently investigating the gendered use of personal ornaments in the approximately 100 burials in the Period IVb cemetery at the site of Hasanlu, Iran, an exceptionally rich site for the study of dress and gender.

Gender is an essential aspect of our identity as individuals and as members of social groups. While earlier generations of scholars viewed the different identities and roles of men and women as a natural outgrowth of biological differences, most now view gender primarily as a learned cultural attribute, along the lines of a language. It is both variable and specific to a particular time and place, in contrast to biological sex, which operates on a genetic level and manifests relativelyconsistently across time and geography.

Masculinity and masculine identity, for example, are shaped and restated throughout life, through countless social cues and interactions, the use of language, specific forms of dress, rites of passage, and through cultural traditions (myths, folktales, etc.) that provide positive and negative exemplars. But notions of gender and sexuality once viewed as “normal” or universal, such as binary gender (that everyone identifies as either masculine or feminine) and heteronormativity (the binary expression of sexuality for the purpose of reproduction)—are largely specific to the western, Victorian inspired culture in which modern scholarship has taken place. Many cultures, for example, recognize a “third” or “other” gender, which is neither predominantly masculine or feminine, or that simply doesn’t fit into “male” or “female” genders within a given society.

Hasanlu lies in the Ushnu-Solduz Valley near Lake Urmia in Northwestern Iran. It was excavated by a joint expedition of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Iranian Antiquities Department, led by Robert Dyson of the University of Pennsylvania between 1956 and 1977. The site was occupied from the Neolithic though the medieval period. From its strategic location in an arable valley, Mesopotamia was accessible to the west through Zagros Mountain passes, and the South Caucasus and eastern Anatolia could be reached through river valleys north of Lake Urmia.

In the early Iron Age, when the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Urartian Empire were on the rise, Hasanlu was at its largest and grandest. Its fortified citadel had numerous monumental buildings, and was surrounded by an outer town that included cemeteries. This period of prosperity ended catastrophically with the destruction of the citadel at the hands of a marauding army in about 800 BCE. Unfortunately, the historical identity of the site and its residents is not known, primarily because writing was never used there.

Hasanlu’s destruction level has yielded an abundance of material and data for Hasanlu Period IVb, the period immediately preceding the attack. The burning and collapse of the citadel prohibited subsequent looting, creating unusual archaeological contexts that include sealed temple treasuries, as well as the crushed bodies of hundreds of Hasanlu’s citizens and enemy combatants. Not only do these materials shed light on life and death on Hasanlu’s citadel, they contribute to our understanding of the grave goods, particularly the personal ornaments, discovered in the lower mound cemetery.A typical archaeological sites, jewelry and other ornaments are preserved in hoards, foundation deposits, and in burials, none of which are particularly helpful in determining the use and meaning of bodily adornment during an individual’s life. But at Hasanlu, the sealed storerooms demonstrate which items of jewelry were considered valuable enough to collect, and the “accidental burials” of dressed and ornamented bodies in the midst of the destruction provide rare glimpses adornment for men, women and children. These provide evidence for the ways personal adornment contributed to the formation and expression of gender at the site.How can we bridge the intellectual gap between past and present, and attempt to understand the gendered significance of material goods in their original context, without imposing our assumptions about gender? In the Hasanlu burials, the biological entities (human remains) and cultural selves (social identity) are bound together, packaged and presented to an audience that is both temporal (through the funeral ritual) and potentially eternal (in a possible afterlife). Although sex and gender are not causally related, there are enough links between biological sex, reproductive role and gender, to make it useful to determine the sex of each burial’s occupant.

In the past, archaeologists would impose assumptions about the gendered nature of particular categories of grave goods (for example, the simplistic equations of “jewelry=woman/weapons=man’) to determine the sex of the burial’s occupants. But it is clear from examples of burials of armed elite women, ranging from Viking Europe to the Eurasian Steppes and beyond, that this method is problematic. In the case of Hasanlu, there are enough well-preserved skeletons to allow us to begin with the bodies themselves, namely with the osteological data preserved in the human remains. While these analyses are by no means foolproof, bioarchaeology can help determine likely sex, approximate age at death, and other physical attributes of the deceased.

Of the approximately 100 burials from period IVb at Hasanlu, 70 skeletons were evaluated by bioarchaeologists. Of these 21 appear to be adult men, 19 appear to be adult women, while the remainder are children and subadults (whose sex linked traits have not yet emerged), and adults of indeterminate sex. Within these groups, patterns of artifact distribution emerge very clearly. These suggest that certain types of artifacts are being used in a genderedfashion, and in some instances, their use does not contradict the expectations of our Victorian forebears. For example, some types of jewelry, particularly bracelets, finger rings and neck beads, are associated with burials of all ages and sexes – men, women, and children.

In contrast, other types are largely confined to women or men. Multiple short garment pins and long, very sharp pins that may have fastened shrouds are found with female bodies, indicating that women wore a type of garment that was wrapped and fastened near the neck and shoulder with pins. If worn in life, these pins were sufficiently numerous and dangerous to impact the comfort and restrict the movements of the women who wore them. Elaborate and valuable beaded headdresses—some with gold beads—are also associated with the most elite and well adorned of the women who died in peak childbearing years – between 20-35 years of age. By drawing attention to the head and face, these ornaments may have accentuated the youth, beauty and fertility of these women.

Elite men, on the other hand, were accompanied by objects that both shaped and drew attention to their masculine bodies, including heavy iron and bronze weapons and armor, as well as bulky iron and bronze armlets and anklets. Many less elite males were buried with beads, bracelets, arrowheads and iron knives.

These masculine and feminine artifacts aren’t simply outward signs of identity, they interact with the bodies they adorn, concealing and revealing them, shaping them, modifying their movements, making their wearers into gendered members of the Hasanlu community, both visually and behaviorally.

One older man’s burial, however, challenges the male/female categories described above. This burial included both objects that at Hasanlu are gendered masculine (arrowheads) and an indication of feminine attire (a garment pin at the shoulder). On its own, a single atypical burial might not be a sufficient indication of a third or other gender at a site, but in this case this interpretation is supported by additional visual evidence. The famous Hasanlu Gold Bowl clearly shows a bearded figure, dressed in women’s clothing and seated on the ground in a posture that in Iranian art is feminine.

Of course, burials and images are both constructions and not direct reflections of reality. But in both the case of the Hasanlu burial and the image on the gold bowl, deliberate choices were made to cloak a male body in feminine clothing and behavior.

Much work remains to be done on Hasanlu, particularly on the chaotic and incredibly complex citadel destruction level, where literally thousands of items of personal adornment were found on and around fallen bodies, as well as throughout the elite buildings. These remarkable contexts will make an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the site and its people, and in turn will illuminate the findings from the cemetery. Together they help us bridge the years that have passed since the last funeral took place in the Hasanlu IVb cemetery, and the terrible day that the site fell.

Megan Cifarelli is Associate Professor of the Department of Art History at Manhattanville College.