Adornment practices in the ancient Near East and the question of embodied boundary maintenance

Abstract

This chapter is an exploration of the entanglement of cognition and embodied cultural and social identity. Evidence derived mainly from mortuary contexts and supplemented by pictorial and iconographic sources indicates that anklets were a common form of adornment during the Bronze and Iron Ages in the southern Levant, and indeed forms the largest category of metal jewellery for those periods. Studies of anklets have, in the past, focused on their ethnic significance, their metallurgical properties, and their role as an expression of gender and age; however, little considered is how sensory experience and corporeal embodiment can lead to decisions that challenge cultural meanings. Recent studies of cognitive neurobiology suggest that emotions are integral to cognition; furthermore, they are an essential aspect of memory formation and retrieval. Somatic effects, such as weight, pressure, movement, as well as other sensory qualities such as sight and sound, will therefore be discussed in light of their implications for adornment in bodily practice, in order to explore how identity for ancient individuals may have been a matter of bodily perceptions and how sensory experiences affected them physiologically.