The Everlasting Shoe: What Does a 5,500-Year-Old Shoe Discovered in a Cave Tell Us About Ancient Armenians?

As any archaeologist knows, very few things other than stone last for a long time. In a moist, warm climate, most organic material such as hemp, cloth, wood, and leather will decay, leaving nothing but stone and perhaps bone at an archaeological site.

This is one reason why the Stone Age got its name, not because everything was made of stone, but because it is mostly stone tools and ornaments that have survived and thus it is mainly stone items that are representative of that time-period.

All organic materials such animal skins worn by Paleolithic or Neolithic peoples have, for the most part, disappeared. In the right environment though, such materials can last for thousands of years.

If an environment is dry, and undisturbed, normally fragile, perishable material can last for millennia. One example of this is a 5,500-year-old leather shoe found in an Armenian cave which is one of several other examples of ancient footwear.

Other Preserved Ancient Shoes

Two other famous examples of ancient footwear are sandals found in the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri and another in the Cave of the Warrior in the Judaean Desert.

The shoes in the Arnold Research Cave are between 800 and 8,000 years old. The youngest were made of deerskin while the oldest were sandals made of fibers from a plant called rattlesnake master.

The shoes found in the Cave of the Warrior were also sandals made from leather that were determined to be about 6,000 years old. The leather sandals were found with a reed mat, a bow with a quiver of arrows, and a flint knife, among other items.

The Judaean Desert is known for its dry climate, providing excellent preserving conditions. The desert has also been used for thousands of years by fugitives on the run who hid their belongings in caves and never retrieved them.

Other items found in the Judaean Desert include the Dead Sea Scrolls dating to between 200 BC and 200 AD and a cache of bronze instruments and ornaments determined to be about 6,000 years old.

It should be noted that the two other examples of ancient footwear were not directly dated, but were dated using comparison with other artifacts found in the caves.

The Armenian shoes were directly dated with radiocarbon dating. The great antiquity of the Armenian shoe is thus more certain than the antiquity of the other shoes.

The Armenian Shoe

The 5,500-year-old shoe was discovered by an Armenian graduate student from the Institute of Archaeology of Armenia, Diana Zandaryan. The shoe was preserved by both the cold, dry conditions of the cave and a layer of sheep dung which was covering it, acting as a weathering seal.

Along with the shoe, containers of wheat, barley, and apricots were also discovered. The shoe dates to about 3,500 BC making it is a few centuries older than the initial levels of Stonehenge, the construction of which began in 3,000 BC.

It is not certain why the shoe or the other items were left there. They could have been left for storage or hidden there in a time of conflict. It is also possible that they were left there as an offering, possibly of a religious nature.

Another question is whether it was worn by a man or a woman. The shoe is small, women’s size by modern European and American standards, however it could have also been worn by a man in this time-period.

Life and Times of the Shoe

During the time that this shoe was in use, the inhabitants of Armenia had already been farming for thousands of years, having adopted domesticates from the Levant.

It is also around this time that the Kurgan culture, the proposed carriers of the Proto-Indo-European language began to move out of their ancestral homeland.

Little is known about the Kurgan culture except that they buried their dead in large mounds referred to as kurgans. These mounds are the most archaeologically visible features that they left behind, hence the name of the culture.

It is unknown whether the inhabitants of the caves were in some way related to the Kurgan culture, but we do know interesting things about them.

The people of Armenia of this day used domesticates prevalent during the Neolithic, including wheat, barley and sheep. Armenia was one of the earliest regions to adopt farming and pastoralism.

The archaeological site of Aratashen, which was inhabited about 8,000 years ago, has shown many details of the Neolithic culture of Armenia. They lived in adobe houses, raised barley and had shovels, spoons, and other tools made from wood, bone, and obsidian.

These shoes reveal yet another facet of Prehistoric Armenia, which is already known for its relatively rich archaeological record.

Eventually with enough research, we may learn more things about their culture beyond just what type of shoes they wore, what they ate and other aspects of their material culture.

We may also learn about the immaterial aspects of their culture, such as small glimpses of how they viewed the world.

The Everlasting Shoe: What Does This 5,500-Year-old Shoe Found in a Cave Tell Us About Ancient Armenians?

As any archaeologist knows, very few things other than stone last for a long time. In a moist, warm climate, most organic material such as hemp, cloth, wood, and leather will decay, leaving nothing but stone and perhaps bone at an archaeological site.

This is one reason why the Stone Age got its name, not because everything was made of stone, but because it is mostly stone tools and ornaments that have survived and thus it is mainly stone items that are representative of that time-period.

All organic materials such animal skins worn by Paleolithic or Neolithic peoples have, for the most part, disappeared. In the right environment though, such materials can last for thousands of years. If an environment is dry, and undisturbed, normally fragile, perishable material can last for millennia. One example of this is a 5,500-year-old leather shoe found in an Armenian cave which is one of several other examples of ancient footwear.

Other Preserved Ancient Shoes

Two other famous examples of ancient footwear are sandals found in the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri and another in the Cave of the Warrior in the Judaean Desert. The shoes in the Arnold Research Cave are between 800 and 8,000 years old. The youngest were made of deerskin while the oldest were sandals made of fibers from a plant called rattlesnake master.

The shoes found in the Cave of the Warrior were also sandals made from leather that were determined to be about 6,000 years old. The leather sandals were found with a reed mat, a bow with a quiver of arrows, and a flint knife, among other items.

The Judaean Desert is known for its dry climate, providing excellent preserving conditions. The desert has also been used for thousands of years by fugitives on the run who hid their belongings in caves and never retrieved them.

Other items found in the Judaean Desert include the Dead Sea Scrolls dating to between 200 BC and 200 AD and a cache of bronze instruments and ornaments determined to be about 6,000 years old.

It should be noted that the two other examples of ancient footwear were not directly dated, but were dated using comparison with other artifacts found in the caves. The Armenian shoes were directly dated with radiocarbon dating. The great antiquity of the Armenian shoe is thus more certain than the antiquity of the other shoes.

The Armenian Shoe

The 5,500-year-old shoe was discovered by an Armenian graduate student from the Institute of Archaeology of Armenia, Diana Zandaryan. The shoe was preserved by both the cold, dry conditions of the cave and a layer of sheep dung which was covering it, acting as a weathering seal.

Along with the shoe, containers of wheat, barley, and apricots were also discovered. The shoe dates to about 3,500 BC making it is a few centuries older than the initial levels of Stonehenge, the construction of which began in 3,000 BC.

It is not certain why the shoe or the other items were left there. They could have been left for storage or hidden there in a time of conflict. It is also possible that they were left there as an offering, possibly of a religious nature.

Another question is whether it was worn by a man or a woman. The shoe is small, women’s size by modern European and American standards, however it could have also been worn by a man in this time-period.

Life and Times of the Shoe

During the time that this shoe was in use, the inhabitants of Armenia had already been farming for thousands of years, having adopted domesticates from the Levant. It is also around this time that the Kurgan culture, the proposed carriers of the Proto-Indo-European language began to move out of their ancestral homeland.

Little is known about the Kurgan culture except that they buried their dead in large mounds referred to as kurgans. These mounds are the most archaeologically visible features that they left behind, hence the name of the culture.

It is unknown whether the inhabitants of the caves were in some way related to the Kurgan culture, but we do know interesting things about them. The people of Armenia of this day used domesticates prevalent during the Neolithic, including wheat, barley and sheep.

Armenia was one of the earliest regions to adopt farming and pastoralism. The archaeological site of Aratashen, which was inhabited about 8,000 years ago, has shown many details of the Neolithic culture of Armenia. They lived in adobe houses, raised barley and had shovels, spoons, and other tools made from wood, bone, and obsidian.

These shoes reveal yet another facet of Prehistoric Armenia, which is already known for its relatively rich archaeological record. Eventually with enough research, we may learn more things about their culture beyond just what type of shoes they wore, what they ate and other aspects of their material culture. We may also learn about the immaterial aspects of their culture, such as small glimpses of how they viewed the world.

Unraveling the Mystery of the “Armenian Stonehenge”

The misty and mountainous valleys of the south Caucasus have been host to human activity continuously for thousands of years, but only recently has the Western archaeological world had access to them.

From the cave in which researchers found the world’s oldest shoe and the oldest winemaking facility, to traces of an Urartian city with hundreds of wine-holding vessels buried in the ground, the last four decades have witnessed extraordinary interest from scholars and tourists alike in the smallest republic in the former Soviet Union. None, however, are as quite as tantalizing as the 4.5 hectare archaeological site whose name is as contested as its mysterious origins.

Located in Armenia’s southernmost province, Zorats Karer, or as it is vernacularly known, Karahundj, is a site which has been inhabited numerous times across millennia, from prehistoric to medieval civilizations.

It consists of a prehistoric mausoleum and nearby, over two hundred neighboring large stone monoliths, eighty of which have distinctive, well-polished holes bored near their upper edge.

In recent years, to the dismay of local scientists, the monoliths have garnered the interest of the international community after some pre-emptive research emerged drawing comparisons between the astronomical implications of Zorats Karer and that of the famous Stonehenge monument in England.

Many touristic outlets responded to the comparison by branding Zorats Karer colloquially as the ‘Armenian Stonehenge’ and the resulting debate between the scientific community and popular culture has been a fierce one.

The first scholarly account of Zorats Karer took place in 1935 by ethnographer Stepan Lisitsian, who alleged that it once functioned as a station for holding animals. Later, in the 1950s, Marus Hasratyan discovered a set of 11th to 9th century BCE burial chambers.

But the first investigation which garnered international attention to the complex was that of Soviet archaeologist Onnik Khnkikyan, who claimed in 1984 that the 223 megalithic stones in the complex may have been used, not for animal husbandry, but instead for prehistoric stargazing. 

He believed the holes on the stones, which are two inches in diameter and run up to twenty inches deep, may have been used as early telescopes for looking out into the distance or at the sky.

Intrigued by the astronomical implications, the next series of investigations were conducted by an astrophysicist named Elma Parsamian from the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, one of the main astronomy centers of the USSR.

She and her colleagues observed the position of the holes according to an astronomical calendar and established that several of them aligned with the sunrise and sunset on the day of the summer solstice.

She is also responsible for suggesting the name Karahundj for the site, after a village 40km away by the same name. Prior to her investigations, locals referred to the site as Ghoshun Dash, which meant ‘Army of Stones’ in Turkic.

Folk myth suggests the stones were erected in ancient times to commemorate soldiers killed in war. After the 1930s, locals transitioned to the Armenian translation, Zorats Karer. But Karahundj, Parsamian said, offered a more interesting name because Kar, means stone and hundj, a peculiar suffix which has no meaning in Armenian, sounds remarkably similar to the British ‘henge’.

In recent years, this name has received extreme criticism from scholars and in scientific texts, the name Zorats Karer is used nearly exclusively.

Several years later, a radiophysicist named Paris Herouni performed a series of amateur studies branching off from Parsamian’s, using telescopic methods and the precession laws of Earth. He argued that the site actually dates back to around 5500 BCE., predating its British counterpart by over four thousand years.

He strongly pioneered for a direct comparison to Stonehenge and even went so far as to etymologically trace the name Stonehenge to the word Karahundj, claiming it really had Armenian origins. He was also in correspondence with the leading scholar of the Stonehenge observatory theory, Gerald Hawkins, who approved of his work. His claims were quick to catch on, and other scholars who strongly contest his finding have found them difficult to dispel.

The problem with the “Armenian Stonehenge” label, notes archaeo-astronomer Clive Ruggles in Ancient Astronomy: An Encyclopedia of Cosmologies and Myth, is that analyses that identify Stonehenge as an ancient observatory have today largely been dispelled. As a result, he says, the research drawing comparisons between the two sites is “less than helpful.”

According to Professor Pavel Avetisyan, an archaeologist at the National Academy of Sciences in Armenia, there is no scientific dispute about the monument. “Experts have a clear understanding of the area,” he says, “and believe that it is a multi-layered [multi-use] monument, which requires long-term excavation and study.” 

In 2000, he helped lead a team of German researchers from University of Munich in investigating the site. In their findings, they, too, criticized the observatory hypothesis, writing, “… [A]n exact investigation of the place yields other results. [Zora Karer], located on a rocky promontory, was mainly a necropolis from the Middle Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Enormous stone tombs of these periods can be found within the area.” Avetisyan’s team dates the monument to no older than 2000 BCE, after Stonehenge, and also suggested the possibility that the place served as a refuge during times of war in the Hellenistic period.

“The view that the monument is an ancient observatory or that its name is Karahundj is elementary charlatanism, and nothing else. All of that,” says Avetisian, “has nothing to do with science.”

Unfortunately for Avetisyan, dispelling myths about Zorats Karer is difficult when so few resources exist in English to aid the curious Westerner. Richard Ney, an American who moved to Armenia in 1992, founded the Armenian Monuments Awareness Project and authored the first English-language resource to the site from 1997, has witnessed over two decades of back-and-forth.

He believes Karahundj is “caught between two different branches of science with opposing views on how to derive fact. Both are credible,” he says, “and I feel both can be correct, but will never admit it.”

Despite all the controversy and whatever you end up deciding to call it, the monument itself is stunning and located in an area of Armenia well-endowed with natural beauty, making it an attractive journey for many tourists each year.

It’s even become an object of contemporary interest to young urbanites and neo-Pagans from Yerevan, who are known to celebrate certain solstices there. In many ways, Zorats Karer is a testament to the elusive nature of archaeology, and it’s perhaps the case that the mystery is–and will remain–part of its appeal.