Discovery of Midwest’s Oldest Shoe; Research Will Lead To Further Knowledge of Early Cultures East of Rockies
University of Missouri-Columbia researcher Michael O’Brien is trying to learn more about those cultures eight thousand years ago where no surviving culture had known or heard about our modern day popular shoe brands such as Nike, Reebok, Addidas, Birkenstock or Gucci but knew about the importance of walking comfortably with a good shoe with his recent discovery of some of the oldest shoes known to exist in the Midwest.
A large collection of sandals and other types of shoes has been amassed by the University since the mid 1950’s from an archaeological site in Central Missouri but no known safe method of dating the shoes has been available because previous dating methods required large amount of materials will be destroyed in the dating process.
Through the use of a recent technique called accelerator mass spectrometry, O’Brien uses this process of dating which was also used in the dating process of the famous Shroud of Turin which significantly reduces the amount of materials that could be destroyed through this dating process compared to other methods.The result was accurate dating and insight into a culture that lived more than 8,000 years ago in the Midwest. This marks the oldest such discovery east of the Rocky Mountains. Older artifacts have been found west of the mountains on the Colorado Plateau, which has an arid environment favorable to preservation. “These sandals are perishable and the fact that we had any material at all was really good,” O’Brien said. “When we went in for the dating, we selected different types of shoe construction and discovered a range of 7,500 years of construction technique.”
“The earliest shoe dated in the research was 8,325 years old. This very early shoe construction shows how people were making use of environmental resources,” O’Brien said. “This collection is a very significant example of one kind of a material culture. We had assumed that cultures living in that particular time frame had materials such as these, but with these new findings, this is now proof.”
O’Brien will use the material and information learned in his discovery to create a database for future use. Currently, there is no usable database with data on cultural material that can be used for such studies.
“Fifteen to 20 years from now, people can come back and use this database for their own studies and add to the knowledge that we have already gained,” O’Brien said. “With what we have learned in this discovery, it adds one more piece to the puzzle.”
O’Brien was assisted in his research by Jenna Kuttruff, an associate professor in the School of Human Ecology at Louisiana State University; and S. Gail DeHart, a graduate student at LSU.
His discovery will be published this week in the journal Science.
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