Adornment, Personal Ornamentation, and the Construction of Identity: A Global Archaeological Perspective

Items of personal adornment are found in archaeological contexts all over the world. While the specific meanings ascribed to these objects likely varied widely in the past, their social values are generally interpreted in relation to individual or group identity. Recent research highlights the ways in which personal ornaments served integral roles in the creation, maintenance, and negotiation of different aspects of identity, such as gender, age, social status, ethnicity, lineage or group affiliation, and participation in ideological and power structures. In some cases, these objects were vital to social transactions, ritual performances, the creation of social memories, the legitimation of authority, or the renewal of the existing social order. In contemporary work, these research issues are increasingly examined within the frameworks of embodied practice and materiality. In these approaches, the production, circulation, and discard of material objects create, reproduce, and transform the contours of the social world, defining relationships between individuals, social segments of various scales, and both the natural and cultural landscapes. The papers in this session present recent research on objects of adornment from a variety of geographic and temporal contexts, focusing on the ways they were used to construct and negotiate different elements of social identity.