Small Accessories of Women's Headwear of the Bronze Age in the Southern Urals: research and reconstruction techniques

The article features an analysis of a group of women's headwear accessories dating back to the Bronze Age. Women's costume of the Southern Urals was almost exclusively represented in the Bronze Age by adornments and adornment complexes. The issues of costume reconstruction are related to the almost total absence of the organic component, frequent looting of funerary complexes and the effects of taphonomic processes. A series of taphonomic experiments conducted by the author allowed to identify certain trends in the destruction of complex adornments during their archaeologization. The research of these materials allowed to identify series of artifacts which could have constituted fragments of small headwear accessories (clasps or combs). As noted by the author, these series of Bronze Age artifacts have not been considered by researchers as the remains of small women's headdress accessories. In this regard, the reconstruction of headdress details with the use of taphonomic process analysis and the corresponding experiments has a certain significance in terms of methodology.