The ancient shoe, ready for laces.
There, humans have been mining the precious material for almost 7,000 years.
Archeologists have been finding evidence of these ancient miners and their activities at similar mines in Austria.
The ancient shoe, ready for laces. (Photo:Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum)
One recent find includes a child’s leather shoe, almost perfectly preserved for an estimated 2,100 years.
The shoe was discovered in a salt mine south of Salzburg near the Austrian village of Durrnberg.
Made of leather, the item has triangle eyelets which would have been laced up with string.
Some remaining flax or linen suggests the long-lost lace.
The other half of the pair, however, is likely lost to history.
Perhaps their job was to shovel up discarded rocks.
Or perhaps they carried precious materials to the surface.
Maybe they had a different job entirely, Aspen Pflughoeftwrites.
The only clue they left behind was a 2,100-year-old shoe.
Salt was a precious commodity, enabling flavor as well as preservation of food.
Hence the irony of its perfect preservation of the child’s shoesalt, still precious after all this time.
