IF YOU want to buy some traditional American footwear, forget leather moccasins. You need a pair of Mexican Huarachi sandals.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a time-tested design,鈥� says Mike O鈥橞rien, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who has carbon-dated seven ancient shoes from a cave in Missouri. The oldest is a woven sandal 8300 years old which bears a striking resemblance to the Huarachi shoes sold in Mexican markets today.
These ancient shoes are part of a collection found 40 years ago. The 18 reasonably intact shoes in the collection include 11 woven slip-ons. Five of the slip-ons have been dated, and they vary in age from 1100 to 5400 years.
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The collection includes only two leather moccasins, the shoes which early European explorers found North American Indians wearing. The one O鈥橞rien dated is 940 years old. Although leather moccasins may be a relatively modern development, O鈥橞rien says he would need to date more samples to be sure.
All the woven shoes have thick soles, showing wear under the heel and ball of the foot. 鈥淭hey would have been very comfortable,鈥� says O鈥橞rien, who outlines his findings in Science ().
The fibres used to make the woven shoes all came from the leaves of a yucca-like plant called the rattlesnake master, which still grows in the southeastern US.