Emily Chan
Sometime during the Middle Ages, an unfortunate individual lost their shoe. Archaeologists unearthed the battered remains of a piece of footwear in an ancient street located underneath a construction site in Freiberg, Germany.
The city of Freiberg is undergoing a construction project in one of its oldest parts of town. Rusted pipes and cables are being replaced while archaeologists conduct excavations in the area.
They found that the top layer of the shoe was made of leather, and it is thought to date back to the fourteenth century. Fragments of ceramic were also found in the area, which helped researchers determine how old the shoe was.
Christoph Heiermann, department leader at the Saxon State Office for Archaeology in Dresden, stated that someone may have tossed the shoe out after it had been worn beyond repair.
Thanks to the lack of oxygen and the extremely moist soil under which it was buried, the shoe has managed to stay largely intact over the centuries.
Heirermann speculates that the dampness of the soil is likely due to an ancient body of water that no longer exists. He also notes that the preservation of leather is a rather rare phenomenon.
About five feet below the surface of the ground, archaeologists came across evidence of a body of water, confirming Heirermann’s theory. They found wooden water pipes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The shoe, along with the ceramic fragments, have now been brought to a restoration laboratory, where scientists are keeping them submerged in water to prevent them from drying out and deteriorating any further. According to Heiermann, if the artifacts don’t stay moist, they would crumble to dust in just the span of a few weeks.
Aside from the ancient footwear, researchers have uncovered a number of other interesting finds during their excavations. Among them were two unpaved roads that dated back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as a pit in front of one of the oldest buildings in Freiburg.
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