Elnaz Latifpour will be sharing her research into southwestern Iranian carpet weaving as part of the Archaeology Brown Bag Series. This is a wonderful opportunity to learn about traditional material culture, the weavers who create the carpets, and the context and challenges of these famous textiles in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Abstract: This paper draws on my firsthand study of roughly 80 southern Iranian weavings—predominantly Qashqai (a confederation of nomadic groups in southwestern Iran)—across North American museum collections, dating from approximately 1850 to 1950. Among these objects, two pictorial carpets in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), known as the Virgin Mary and Ahmed Shah carpets, are exceptions. Never before studied or contextualized within the larger corpus, these works diverge from common types primarily in their iconography, their centralized composition and imagery, which contrast sharply with the abstract, geometry characteristic of Qashqai production.
By analyzing these two examples alongside other examples from my corpus, this paper examines how such departures from “typical” weaving practice may reflect special commissions, external market demands, or individual experimentation. Situating these carpets within the shifting social and economic conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I use them to probe larger questions about authenticity, adaptation, and the porous boundary between local tradition and commercial exchange. Ultimately, the Virgin Mary and Ahmed Shah carpets challenge fixed definitions of tribal art and help us understand the forces that shaped the weaving cultures of southern Iran.