Approaches to Archaeological Footwear

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Approaches to Archaeological Footwear" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Evidence deriving from changes in the architecture of the human foot suggests that footwear has been an important component of human technology for at least that last 50,000 years. Beyond becoming a signature feature of dress and adornment in many cultures, footwear has also played an underappreciated role in human mobility and the colonization of diverse biomes. Footwear, including diverse forms such as sandals, slippers, moccasins, and shoes, has historically been neglected in archaeological research, however, in favor of other classes of material culture. This is largely due to footwear’s perishability and the challenges to classification posed by their formal and structural variability. Despite these limitations, prior research demonstrates the potential of ancient foot dressing practices to contribute to archaeological questions relating to ancient economies, long-term technological change and innovation, social boundaries and identities, individual- and population-level health and demography, and population movement, among other things. The primary goal of this session is to integrate often disparate threads of research involving different types of ancient footwear, as well as different methodological and theoretical approaches, to highlight the potential of such items for addressing a wide range of anthropological questions and articulate pathways for future research on archaeological footwear.