When I saw the headline, I imagined a tall pointy cone like a wizard's hat. This is a just a small thing, somewhere between a skull cap and a fez.
So, if you take away the word "cone" or "conical", what do we have? A small hat made of wax reinforced with fabric.
I say take away the word "cone" because it is a distraction. How would a future generation consider evidence of "cylindrical headpiece" (top hat) or a "soft felt discus" (beret)? Perhaps most relevantly, a "hat in the shape of a truncated cone" is a fez.
My point is that in an attempt to describe in precise terms something that is not understood, the terminology used can have subliminal associations. A conical hat sounds like something that would be worn for ritual or magical purposes, where as a "small waxed cloth hat with a low pointed crown" just sounds like a garment. Plenty of people wear waxed cotton caps in the UK today.
We may never know why these conical hats were worn, and there may have been no single overriding reasons. My own ideas include:
Just fashion. Wax, reinforced with cloth, would make a cheap, easy to decorate, and malleable hat. You could decorate the wax with incisions, or sprinkle it with coloured powders, or embed semi precious stones or beads into the wax. You could wear it "straight" as a cone, or squash or shape it according to your taste, age group, attitude, etc.
Compare this with how the standard brimmed felt hat is worn, with some people putting a crease in the crown, others putting dimples in it, some folding up the brim, others folding it down, and so on. My grandfather was of the generation and class that he never went out without his hat. If at the end of the evening, he and his friends had gone to take their hats off the rack, they would all have been trilbies, but each man would have immediately recognised his own.
Compare it also with the simple baseball cap, where much can be told about a person from the quality of the hat, the shape of the peak, and which way the peak faces when the hat is being worn.
Some have assumed that the wax cones would have melted. This is something that could be tested empirically, but my guess is that it would soften and not simply melt into a pool. If you went out in the hot sun all day, this might be shown in the state of your hat. A waxed hat might even have served a similar purpose to the "radiation badges" that fog when you've had too much exposure "Your hat's starting to droop, Dave, you'd better get in the shade."
Another possibility is that by wearing a waxed hat, which would provide no protection from the sun, and be vulnerable to heat damage itself, the wearer was demonstrating that they had sufficient status to work indoors in the shade. I'd draw a comparison with cultures where wealthy women paint their palms, or grow and paint their finger nails, as a way of showing that they do not have to work with their hands. Perhaps those who did manual work outdoors wore brimmed hats, and the bosses who worked in the "back office" wore brimless waxed hats.
A common pattern of baldness in males is a thinning crown. A small circular hat might conceal this.
I imagine that these hats were semi-disposable, and to some extent, recyclable.
We may simply be attaching too much importance to them because they are so different from anything we wear today. We all know that archaeologists and prehistorians reach for "ritual significance" as a generic explanation for anything that has no obvious practical purpose. At the time, these hats may have had no more significance than being the predominant daily headgear for one class or group in society.
, and then creating questions which define a different result.
