Despite its age of 5,500 years, this “astonishingly modern” shoe has been stunningly preserved by sheep dung and aridity.
An 5,500-year-old leather shoe was found in excellent condition in the Areni-1 cave located in Armenia’s Vayots Dzor province. The one-piece leather-hide shoe is the oldest piece of leather footwear known to archaeologists.
Made from a single piece of cowhide, the shoe is laced with a leather cord along seams at the front and back and was probably tailor-made for the right foot of its owner. It is about as big as a current women’s size seven (U.S.), but its owner could as well have been a man – we just don’t know enough about the feet of people who lived in this region back then to be able to tell for sure.
One thing is certain though: shoes made with this technique today (that would be labelled “whole cut”) are extremely expensive.
“The hide had been cut into two layers and tanned, which was probably quite a new technology,” explained Ron Pinhasi from University College Cork in Ireland, lead author of a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE.
Yvette Worrall, a shoemaker for the Conker handmade-shoe company in the U.K., added, “I’d imagine the leather was wetted first and then cut and fitted around the foot, using the foot as a last [mold] to stitch it up there and then.”
Again, the final result looks surprisingly familiar for something so ancient.
“It is astonishing how much this shoe resembles a modern shoe!” Manolo Blahnik, one of the world’s best known shoe designers, told National Geographic.
Armenian post-graduate student Diana Zardaryan discovered the leather shoe in the Areni-1 cave during excavations by an international team of archaeologists from Armenia, Ireland and the United States. It was found upside down at the base of a shallow, round-shaped, and plastered pit, hidden under an overturned broken Chalcolithic ceramic bowl. Goat horns and a broken pot were also found nearby, along with drinking cups excavated next to a set of ancient graves, suggesting that the site was used for funeral ceremonies and ritualistic practices. Excavations in the same area also found the world’s oldest wine-making site.
Normally, leather and plant materials degrade very quickly, so shoes of this age are rarely ever found. However, the roof of the Areni-1 cave collapsed at one point and the organic material below was preserved due to the sheep dung present, preventing fungi from destroying it.
“The cave environment kept it cool and dry, while the dung cemented the finds in,” Pinhasi explained.
Shoes like this would have enabled ancient people to cope with extreme temperatures in the region—up to 113°F (45°C) in summer and below freezing in winter—and to travel large distances. After all, protecting the foot was probably the main reason why people started wearing shoes in the first place, and the world’s oldest known leather shoe is no exception.
