Tuesday, May 10, 2005
This Day:

Ok, I dont know if it really smells bad or not :D. But scientists in UK have found a 2,000 year old shoe, and it is the oldest ever discovered there. The shoe is made of leather, although the experts don't know yet which type of animal skin was used to make it. It seems reasonably well-preserved, with stitch and lace holes still visible in the leather. The shoe is being studied by conservationists in Salisbury, southwest England, and is expected to be displayed at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter.

Not my shoe! (Courtesy: BBC)
It was found when the owners of Whiteball Quarry began working in the area, where a Bronze Age iron-smelting site had been discovered in 1989. Nearby, researchers from Exeter Archaeology found two water troughs, along with two timber-lined wells, preserved by waterlogging and probably dating from the early part of the Iron Age (700 BC to AD 43).
The shoe is nearly 12 inches long, suggesting its owner was male. I am planning to promptly go out after I finish this post, and bury two of my shoes in two different locations. Who knows, may be I (or at least my shoes!) will be famous in a couple of millennia or so :D:D.

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5/10/2005   10 comments Post a Comment

10 Comments:

At May 10, 2005 10:54 PM, Blogger Unknown said...
LOL. I used to bury stuff when i was a kid, for the same reason. But then, i didnt know what was biodegradable and what was not! So all of my stuff got rotten away, when i went to check it a few years later.
 
At May 10, 2005 11:27 PM, Blogger Sray said...
LOL! This is a pretty frivolous post, to be honest :-). But we might learn something new about the people who used that shoe, and how far their technology was advanced, just like we learnt a lot from the 5,300 year old iceman's shoes.
 
At May 11, 2005 1:42 AM, Blogger wise donkey said...
:))
well i dont think its trivial, think its quite interesting:)
 
At May 11, 2005 3:16 AM, Blogger Unknown said...
Yea! Its important to know how we were long long ago. As Churchill once said "The further backward we look, the further forward we can see"
 
At May 11, 2005 3:25 AM, Blogger Unknown said...
I wanted to sign up for the geoloc thing. The pages are all in french. I got it translated using google. but yet couldnt get to anything like a signup page. How did u get across sray?
 
At May 11, 2005 3:29 AM, Blogger Sray said...
WD and Sudhir: Yaa, even though it might look frivolous, it can tell us something about the past that we might never know otherwise!!

Sudhir: GeoLoc is in French. The login page is tricky.. I think they have a daily quota, and if that gets filled up, then they dont allow you to signup :(. So you have to try several times and perhaps get lucky!
 
At May 11, 2005 4:44 AM, Blogger Onkroes said...
This was all over the news here yesterday. The continuing jokes started off funny but became wearing after a while.

The shoe, at 30cm is a UK size 10. That's a pretty decent size for a large man today. We 'know' (correct me if you need to) that people have been getting bigger over the years (from smaller buildings, and clothes, etc, that have been found), so it's somewhat surprising that the shoe is so big. Maybe the guy was a giant among his people?
 
At May 11, 2005 7:11 AM, Blogger Sray said...
True that people are getting bigger, but hey! This is only 2000 years ago. Also, he might be a warrior or tribal elder, so it makes sense if he is tall.
 
At May 11, 2005 8:36 AM, Blogger Onkroes said...
"This is only 2000 years ago."

There are loads of houses over here from 2-300 years ago and the doors are really small (I'm 6ft tall and have to stoop to get through them). And there are lots of suits of armour that would only fit a small man or a child nowadays. There's lots of speculation that it's to do with diet and other 'health' factors, and that's all very convincing. But it stands to reason that 10 times longer ago they should have been shorter/smaller still (at least in Britain where diet's never been great) by inches at least.

I'm not sure they're going to tell anything significant from this find, but it's interesting for it's size. Perhaps it belonged to a visitor to our shores from a land with better diet?
 
At May 11, 2005 8:45 AM, Blogger Sray said...
That is true too. But we only have one single shoe, so it could be of a rare, large individual. Lets wait and see. I will keep following the story :-).
 

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