Most of the shoes on display at the Bata Shoe Museum's exhibition Unearthing Vindolanda 'have never been on exhibition before,' Barbara Birley of the Vindolanda Trust says.Darren Rigo/Supplied
Sixteen centuries after the fall of Rome, traces of the ancient empire can still be found across much of Europe and Western Asia.
It’s there in the ruins of ancient buildings, in unearthed coins and ceramics and in the modern highways that overlap the roads the Romans once built to weave together their multicultural civilization.
But for Elizabeth Greene, nothing feels quite as personal and familiar as the shoes that Romans once wore when they bestrode their world.
“Shoes equals people,” says Greene, an archeologist at Western University in London, Ont., and a specialist in Roman footwear. A shoe, she adds, “is like a memory of a person – and a very intimate one.”
It is a perspective that has guided her work for more two decades at a site long associated with Rome’s farthest northern reach.
This is Vindolanda, a Roman fortress in Britain located midway between Newcastle and Carlisle. From the Mediterranean-based vantage point of the eternal city, it is truly the edge of the world – just a short walk from the ruins of Emperor Hadrian’s famous wall that separated Roman lands from unconquered country beyond.
Vindolanda, a Roman fortress in Britain located midway between Newcastle and Carlisle, is seen from above.Supplied
Yet this location, marginal by Roman imperial standards, has literally become ground zero for Greene and her colleagues.
The reason has to do with wet and anaerobic soil conditions at the site that turned out to be ideal for preserving ancient leather. That includes tent flaps and military gear, but above all nearly 5,000 whole or partial shoes that have been uncovered since systemic excavations first began there in the 1970s.
Nothing so extensive exists anywhere else in the Roman world, including in Italy, where soil conditions are generally too dry for leather to survive intact over such a long period of time.
Now a portion of that vast collection is on display in a special exhibition at Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum, co-curated by Greene and Barbara Birley of the Vindolanda Trust, which oversees the site and its artifacts in Britain.
A military boot on display at the exhibit.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
The show, assembled specifically for the Toronto museum, marks the first time that any footwear from Vindolanda’s extraordinary collection has been seen outside Europe.
“Most of these shoes have never been on exhibition before,” said Birley while guiding The Globe and Mail through the items on display. “I’m really excited about being able to show them to a new audience.”
As Green suggests, more than shoes, the exhibition is about those who wore them, and what that says about life at the edge of the Roman Empire.
Elizabeth Greene, an archeologist at Western University in London, Ont., suggests the exhibition is more about the people who wore the shoes, and what that says about life at the edge of the Roman Empire.Darren Rigo/Supplied
A key takeaway is that Vindolanda is not just a place where men were sent to provide the muscle needed to maintain the empire’s hold on Britain. It was also a community that included women and children. And it lasted for centuries after a military installation was first established there around 85 AD.
To underscore this point, the first items that visitors to the exhibition will see is a shoe from the 2nd century made for a child about 10 to 12 years old.
The state of preservation is striking. The way the leather is cut around the lace holes and decorated with a line of stitching makes clear that this was not shoddy work. It suggests that time was taken to make sure the child was walking around in shoes of equivalent quality to what an adult of some status might wear. They look like they would have felt good.
“We can understand what it’s like to have a bad pair of shoes, and what it’s like to have a comfortable pair of shoes,” Birley said. “It links us back to the history.”
A shoe from the 2nd century made for a child about 10 to 12 years old.Supplied
Greene said her favourite item in the exhibition is woman’s “work slipper” with a sleek design. Its leather insole is worn through at the heel, exposing the cork padding underneath. Given the era, the cork likely came from the Iberian Peninsula, she said.
What attracted her to the shoe is the way it’s possible to glean how it was made. Often shoes found at the site are fragmentary or incomplete, but because so many have turned up, some of the best specimens can shed light on the larger trove.
“The beautiful thing about the Vindolanda collection is that eventually you’re going to find that one,” she said. “And then you see how it all goes together.
For example, Greene said she has examined another work slipper in which the cork is absent and instead balled-up leather serves as a cushion under the insole. “It’s definitely an imitation,” she said. “It’s a knockoff – but did the person wearing it know it was a knockoff? Because you can’t see that inner bit.”
Dr. Elizabeth Greene first encountered Vindolanda while hiking Hadrian’s Wall after studying classics as an undergraduate.Supplied
Greene has done her fair share of both finding and documenting shoes at Vindolanda. Born and educated in the United States, she first encountered the site while hiking Hadrian’s Wall after studying classics as an undergraduate.
She returned as a graduate student and began volunteering at the site, eventually doing a dissertation based on its leather artifacts. The site has continued to be the focal point for her research after she joined the faculty at Western in 2011, and she has spent time there nearly every summer since.
Today the research includes analyzing the collection using statistical methods to help build a portrait of Vindolanda’s population, which could have numbered around 2,000 in its heyday, though settlement sizes are notoriously difficult to estimate.
Vindolanda is also known for wooden writing tablets – letters written in ink on wood that have also survived because of the unique soil conditions and that offer a rare and detailed window into the personal lives of the fort’s inhabitants.
The exhibition runs until September, 2027.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
Today Vindolanda is managed by an independent charitable trust established after the site was purchased by archeologist Eric Birley in the 1930s. The Birley family has been leading work there ever since.
Birley, who is Eric Birley’s granddaughter-in-law, said the site was still occupied well after Rome withdrew from Britain during the 5th century. The time span sheds light on how the Roman soldiers who lived there – who likely came from Belgium and northern France rather than Italy – influenced and in turn were influenced by the local Celtic population, creating a hybrid culture that was part of the legacy of the Roman imperial project.
The footwear, including boots worn by soldiers, is not like the strappy sandals seen in Hollywood epics. Instead they are local adaptations of Roman design, such as closed boots, created with a colder climate in mind.
Even for shoes of more open design, those adaptations likely encompassed “that sock-and-sandal issue that we still continue to consider today,” said Elizabeth Semmelhack, director and senior curator of the Bata Shoe Museum.
She added that she has a soft spot for a bathhouse clog that is part of the exhibition.
A bathhouse clog that is part of the exhibition.Supplied
The clog is instantly recognizable to a modern eye, which makes the ancient footwear all the more relatable. It is another glimpse of a shared experience and an invitation to imagine the daily footsteps that tie us to people living in another time and place.
The glimpse is fleeting in more ways than one. Because of a warming climate in Britain, conditions at Vindolanda are changing. Increasingly, the leather artifacts coming to light there are not in as good a condition as those from previous years.
“They’ve been working for decades, but only a portion of the fort has been excavated,” Semmelhack said. “There’s a race against time to ensure that they can extricate whatever is available.”
Unearthing Vindolanda: Footwear from the Edge of the Roman Empire is on view at the Bata Shoe Museum until September, 2027