Mycenaean Plumes

When Arthur Evans excavated Mycenae, he found some puzzling gold pendant-like ornaments whose function. Holland uses sculpture to suggest that these ornaments were meant to be worn in womens' headdresses as a development from feathered crowns worn in earlier times and possibly connected to the iconography of the sphinx. He further suggests that such ornaments were used by priestesses and reflect a near-Eastern origin rather than the Cretan one previously suggested. Although the topic is somewhat niche, the process used in the paper reveals the very real difficulty of making sense of isolated ornaments found at an archaeological site and the methods that may be used to determine the purpose of such baffling items.