Pathways to the Archaeology of Footwear

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Archaeological Footwear" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper introduces the symposium “Approaches to Archaeological Footwear.” Evidence suggests that footwear has been an important component of human technology for at least the last 50,000 years. In addition to 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 sandals, slippers, moccasins, and shoes, has historically been neglected in archaeological research, however. This is largely due to footwear’s perishability and the challenges to classification posed by its 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, hierarchy and inequality, individual- and population-level health and demography, and population movement, among other things. Here we review the 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.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Approaches to Archaeological Footwear   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36341.0