The Art of Footwear, Footwear as Art: Thirteen Hundred Years of Twined Sandal Production in the Northern Southwest

Summary

Finely woven yucca cordage sandals appeared in the northern Southwest 2000 years ago as a fully formed craft tradition and continued in use until the early A.D. 1200s. Their complex, labor-intensive weave structures, ornate toe finishes, and elaborate iconography suggest that these sandals played important social and symbolic roles in communities of the San Juan region for more than a millennium before disappearing from the archaeological record in the mid-thirteenth century. In this diachronic synthesis, I explore changes in the form, technology, and use contexts of these sandals and changing roles of this elaborate footwear in the ancient northern Southwest.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Communities through Time: Societal Continuity and Transformation in the Northern San Juan Region

Keywords

Spatial Coverage