When fellow passengers asked Pam Endzweig what was in the tool box occupying the airplane seat next to her, she simply said she was carrying botanical samples. While technically true, her white lie concealed the priceless cargo she was delivering from the University to Washington D.C.
Endzweig, who is the Director of Collections at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History, was the traveling companion of an ancient and valuable shoe. The sandal, which is the world’s oldest known example of footwear, had a date with a National Geographic photographer.
National Geographic Magazine wrote about the sandal in its September issue as part of a larger article on the stories shoes tell about society.
The sandal is one of several found in 1938 buried under volcanic ash inside Fort Rock Cave in southeastern Oregon. Constructed of woven sagebrush bark, the shoe is unique because of its distinctive style – a woven sole with a toe flap and ankle strap – “abruptly disappeared” from the archeological record about 9,300 years ago, museum research director Tom Connolly said.
The two other styles of sandals commonly found in Oregon were made for thousands of years until “fairly recent” times,
Connolly said. The Fort Rock style seems to have only been made in a very specific time period and did not exist at the same time as other styles. He said this type of change in the record poses several questions for archaeologists.
“Hopefully we’ll ultimately be able to piece together a coherent human story,” he said. “For years and years there was this accepted explanation for changes. Now it is harder to accept simplistic explanations.”
The sandal has been at the University Museum since its discovery by Luther Cressman, a former University Professor and founder of the museum, but new techniques for dating artifacts have renewed the interest in such items, Connolly said.
“One of the things that has reinvigorated the discussion is that we’ve gone back and done the carbon dating,” he said.
Radio carbon dating, which measures an item’s age based on the amount of carbon remaining in it, was invented in the 1950s but only in the last decade has it really become possible to carbon-date artifacts using small enough samples to preserve the item, Connolly said. The University, in collaboration with the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon and Nevada, has spent the last 10 years dating all types of baskets and sandals found in southeastern Oregon and Northern Nevada.
Connolly said the entire set of Fort Rock sandals tell a story about the people who wore them. There are sandals of all different sizes with various wear patterns, indicating entire families wore the sandals.
“It allows you to get beyond the artifacts as things and think of them as belonging to a community of people who lived there,” he said.
Endzweig said that while the Fort Rock sandal has always been of interest to archaeologists, the coverage in National Geographic is the first time it has been exposed to a wide international audience.
She said that the article is important not only because it is good exposure for the University and the museum, but because it
helps put Oregon archaeology on the map. Many people think of Oregon as a rainy state and don’t realize there are deserts here, and they don’t realize the state has such a wealth of artifacts, she said.
“The sandal is important in itself, but we’re getting a bigger message across,” she said. “People will read this and learn about the ancient people in Oregon.”
Dennis Jenkins, senior research associate at the Museum of Anthropology, said smaller clues on the sandals tell a story about the landscape at the time. Many of the sandals found have mud and pollen embedded in the threads, which tells
scientists what types of “low-growing” plants were in the area.
While some of the sandals were found buried under the ash from Mt. Mazama, the eruption does not seem to have affected the people in the area, Jenkins said.
“What we can tell from studying the sites is that people continued to use the area. The environment rebounds quickly,” he said.
Jenkins, who teaches the University’s Archeological Field School, does ongoing research in several Oregon caves. He said the work is a real eye-opener because he knows how much information has been lost because ancient people lived outdoors.
The study of the sandals found in Fort Rock and other Oregon caves led archaeologists such as Jenkins to begin looking for other samples of weaving found in the sites. Further exploration of the caves has turned up several examples of basketry and fishing nets as well as tiny threads – only .04 millimeters in diameter – woven by hand from individual strands of grass.
Jenkins said the threads, which would have been used to sew all types of clothing together, help paint a picture of the human condition 10,000 years ago.
“It gives you an insight into how much time things took. These people become much more real,” he said.