Diana Zardaryan couldn't have known, back in 2008, when she walked into the Areni-1 cave in southeastern Armenia, that she was about to make history. "I knew that organic artifacts are very rarely found," she later said. When she announced what she had found, "nobody believed me."
'People, my dream has come true: I've found a shoe.'
The team had good reason to investigate Areni-1. "This cave is special because it's a crossroad between Africa, Asia, and Europe," explained Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist, in 2010. "It was likely a major station or trading post." He pointed out Armenia is rich in archaeology but not heavily excavated. Armenia is known for headline-grabbing finds, but Pinhasi and Zardaryan had found a shoe.
"We were cleaning up the clay floor and all of sudden a large cluster of dry reeds came up," recalled Zardaryan, a postgraduate student at the time. "I asked laborers to go out so I could take a closer look."
"As I removed more soil, I exposed a very beautiful pit plastered with high-quality yellow clay," she said.
At the bottom, she saw an upturned bowl with goat horns and a fish spine. She lifted the bowl. "I felt some organic stuff, which I at first thought was a cow ear," she recalled. "I took it out. It was a shoe turned upside down."
'Even the shoelaces were preserved.'
At first, nobody knew what they had. "We thought initially that the shoe was about 600 to 700 years old," Pinhasi said. "They were in such good condition."
It was a right shoe, made from a single piece of cowhide, with 19 sets of eyelets threaded with a leather thong.
"This is a shoe in the modern sense, with technology that prevailed until the 1950s in Ireland and Europe," Pinhasi told Science News.
The team thought it was centuries old. But radiocarbon dating in Oxford and California showed it was older. "[It's] a few hundred years older than the shoes worn by Ötzi, the Iceman."
The shoe turned out to be around 5,500 years old – the oldest leather footwear ever found. Its preservation was a miracle.
"Everyone was stunned by how well preserved that 6,000-year-old shoe was," Zardaryan recalled. "Even the shoelaces were preserved."
Its secret? The stable cave environment – cool, dry conditions – and a thick layer of sheep poop.
The preservation was so complete that straw stuffed inside survived. "First, we thought it was used to pad [the shoe]," Pinhasi said, "but it didn't look all packed. So we wondered whether the straw is used to keep the shape, or keep it warm."
'Footwear […] ideally suited for their environment'
The Areni-1 shoe isn't the oldest ever found – there are older sandals. But none are quite like it: leather; closed-toe; laced; almost modern.
But its worth is also in what it tells us. The wearer was small by modern standards – a European size 37. They must have been hardy.
"These people were walking long distances," said Gregory Areshian, an archaeologist on the team. "The terrain is very rugged, with sharp stones and prickly bushes. We have found obsidian from at least 75 miles away."
It also shows cultural diversity and similarity. The shoe "struck me as very similar to a traditional Balkan footwear known as the opanke," said Elizabeth Semmelhack of the Bata Shoe Museum.
Others compared it to pampooties from Ireland. You could "make a case for this shoe being a forerunner to the North American moccasin," argued shoe historian Rebecca Shawcross – "a design whose influences can be seen in shoes of today."
Of course, the wearer never envisioned being a fashion influencer. They just wanted warm feet.
"They produced a fairly rugged piece of footwear," said Michael O'Brien, an archaeologist not on the project. "[It] was ideally suited for their environment."