Anybody else a bit weirded out by the fact that some 1/4 of the article is spent talking about fringe religious beliefs rather than the actual awesome history of the site?
Thousands of years ago, a person was cleaning out a well in Roman Spain when one of their leather sandals slipped off their foot. Now, 2,000 years later, archaeologists have found the well cleaner’s missing shoe.
Whenever you visit a Roman Fort marked on an O.S. map it’s pretty much always just a barely noticeable hump in the field where there may once have been a wall - if you’re lucky enough to see anything.
A lot of the very few surviving samples do of course look really primitive, but at the high end, cobblers in the Roman world were not fuckin' around.
UC28327 here is a pretty ornate sole with a very modern shape.
The upper on this one must have been super nice when new.
Then, there's no reason to suppose that Marcus Aurelius' (and/or Hadrian's) sandals on their statues were idealized past the point of plausibility, though I'm sure once one government contracted statue with approved Imperial sandals gets made, there's a temptation to stick with the motif regardless of the current Emperor's footwear preferences.
The byline directly under the title says they could be the oldest painted sculpture found. Of course some shameless scumbag editor turns that into a title about “earliest art”.
The name on the coin was “Esunertos,” which can be translated as “mighty as the god Esos,”. The arrival says the coin was recently sold for around £24000
archaeology
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.