Areni-1 Shoe (The Oldest Leather Shoe In World), History Museum of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia

The Areni-1 shoe is a 5,500-year-old leather shoe that was found in 2008 in excellent condition in the Areni-1 cave located in the Vayots Dzor province of Armenia. It is a one-piece leather-hide shoe, the oldest piece of leather footwear in the world known to contemporary researchers. The discovery was made by an international team led by Boris Gasparyan, an archaeologist from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. 

 

An Armenian post-graduate student, Diana Zardaryan, discovered the leather shoe in the course of excavations by a team of archeologists from Armenia’s Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Ireland and the United States. The shoe was found upside down at the base of a shallow, rounded, and plastered pit that was 45 cm (18 in) deep and 44–48 cm (17–19 in) wide, beneath an overturned broken Chalcolithic ceramic bowl. A broken pot and goat horns also were found nearby. Excavations in the same area also found the world's oldest wine-making site. 

Shoe is made of a single piece of leather and was shaped to fit the wearer's foot, the researchers say. They have published details of the discovery from south-east Armenia in the journal Plos One. The shoe contained grass, although the archaeologists are uncertain as to whether this was to keep the foot warm or to maintain the shape of the footwear. The authors are unsure whether it was worn by a man or a woman. The shoe is relatively small, corresponding to a UK women's size 5 (European size 38; US size 7 women), but it could have been worn by a man of that period. It was discovered at the Areni-1 cave in the Vayotz Dzor province of Armenia, which borders on Turkey and Iran.

 

 

 

 

The archaeologists put the shoe's remarkable preservation down to the stable, cool and dry conditions in the cave and the fact that the floor of the cave was covered by a thick layer of sheep dung. This layer of excrement acted as a solid seal, preserving it over the millennia.

Major similarities exist between the manufacturing technique and style of one-piece leather-hide shoes discovered across Europe and the one reported from Areni-1 Cave, suggesting that shoes of this type were worn for millennia across a large and environmentally diverse geographic region. According to Pinhasi, the Areni-1 shoe is similar to the Irish pampootie, a shoe style worn in the Aran Islands up to the 1950s. The shoes are very similar to the traditional shoes of the Balkans, still seen today in festivals, known as Opanci (Opanke).

When the material was dated by the two radiocarbon laboratories in Oxford and California, it was established that the shoe dates back to 3,500 B.C. This date is a few hundred years older than the date given for the leather shoe found on Ötzi the Iceman, 400 years older than those found at Stonehenge, and 1,000 years older than those found at the Great Pyramid of Giza. After having been treated for preservation, the Areni-1 shoe is on display at the History Museum of Armenia, Yerevan.