Posted for Haim Watzman
The discovery in Armenia of the world’s oldest leather shoe seems to show that a good design never goes out of style.
The 5,500 years old shoe, made of a single piece of leather roughly sown in the back, is the oldest shoe discovered in Eurasia, say Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at University College Cork, Ireland, and his colleagues in a new paper in PLoS ONE
It would have been held in place by a leather thong strung through a row of eyelets running down the instep and top of the shoe. Footwear of a very similar design, called “pampooties”, was worn in Ireland’s Aran Islands until the 1950s.
The shoe was discovered in 2008 in the Chalcolithic strata of a cave in Armenia. Carbon dating has now confirmed its ancient provenance. It’s a right shoe, European size 37 (24.5 centimetres long), and was found stuffed with dried grass, possibly to preserve its shape in storage. It was found in such good condition that the excavators originally thought it was only a few hundred years old.
“Archaeologically this cave is of great importance,” Pinhasi said. “It is the only site we know of within a radius of a few hundred kilometres that dates to the Chalcolithic.”
He added that it is still not clear what kind of life the people who lived in the cave led. Since the site is in the highlands, he believes they may have been pastoralist herders. But since cultivated grains were found in the cave, they must have had contact with farmers.
The authors note that many scholars believe that prehistoric humans during this period did not wear shoes on a regular basis, but only when they were needed for warmth or rugged terrain. But the current find, taken together with others of similar dates, shows that a variety of kinds of footwear were in use during the Chalcolithic. This probably means that shoes originated long before and that, where preservation conditions are right, more and older shoes are waiting to be unearthed.
“Enormous similarities exist between the manufacturing technique and style of one-piece leather-hide shoes across Europe and the one reported here from Areni-1 Cave, suggesting that shoes of this type were worn for millennia across a large and environmentally diverse geographic region,” write the authors.
“Given the simplicity of these shoes, it is possible that the design and technology of the shoe was independently invented in various locations across Europe and Southwest Asia. The similarity of the cut and lacing is striking, however, so it also plausible that the technology was invented in one place and spread across the region.”
Until this discovery, the oldest shoe discovered in Eurasia was that worn by Ötzi the Iceman, who lived a few hundred years later than the Armenian cave dwellers. The world’s oldest known footwear is a sandal made of plant material, found in Missouri, dating to about 7,500 years ago. A sandal from the Chalcolithic period is also known from an Israeli cave excavation.
Image: University College Cork