• Roman kids showed off status with shoes

    Elizabeth Greene, University of Western Ontario

    Roman kids wore shoes that reflected their parents' status. This leather sandal with a complicated pattern would have been worn by the fort bigwig's infant child.

    By Stephanie Pappas, Senior Writer, LiveScience

    Even on the farthest-flung frontiers of the ancient Roman Empire, the footwear made the man ­— and the kid.

    Children and infants living in and around Roman military bases around the first century wore shoes that revealed the kids' social status, according to new research presented in Seattle Jan. 4 at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. The teeny-tiny shoes, some sized for infants, not only reveal that families were part of Roman military life, but also show that children were dressed to match their parent's place in the social hierarchy, said study researcher Elizabeth Greene of the University of Western Ontario.

    "The role of dress in expressing status was prominent even for children of the very youngest ages," Greene said.

    Treasure trove of footwear
    Just as today's modern kid might rock a pair of shoes covered in their favorite superheroes, or that light up with every step, ancient Roman kids of well-off families wore more decorative shoes than their commoner contemporaries, Greene's research reveals. Over 4,000 shoes have been found at Vindolanda, a Roman army fort in northern Britain that was occupied from the first to fourth centuries.

    In every time period of the fort's operation, even the very early frontier days, children's shoes show up in crumbled domestic spaces, official military buildings and rubbish heaps, Greene said.

    "We don't even have a period, not even Period 1, where we're free of children's shoes," she said. [ See Images of the Roman Shoes ]

    Shoes and status
    From this pile of footwear, Greene and her colleagues traced what types of children's shoes were found where. They discovered that the decorations on the shoes corresponded to the places they were uncovered. In the barracks, for example, children's shoes mimicked the common boot of adult soldiers.

    Thanks to wooden tablets found at the site, the researchers know which building housed Flavius Cerialis, the prefect of the Ninth Cohort of Batavians around A.D. 100. Flavius' family, including his wife, Sulpicia Lepidina, may have had a role in public life around the base, Greene said. Supporting this idea, the house contained an elaborate infant shoe in the exact style of a high-status man's boot.

    The shoe is for a child too young to walk, but it boasts a full set of iron studs on the sole, just as a man's boot would. The expensive material suggests the shoe was high quality, Greene said. The upper part of the shoe is leather, cut into an elaborate fishnet pattern. Not only does the pattern show off workmanship, it would have revealed colored socks underneath, which the ancient Romans also used to denote status.

    Such a shoe for an infant suggests the owner wore formal dress and would have been shown off at parades and similar events, Greene said. Even as a baby, the offspring of the base's bigwig would have been expected to follow in his footsteps.

    Common shoes
    Elsewhere around the base, shoes were less elaborate. Sixteen children's shoes with at least partially intact upper sections were found in the barracks from the period of about A.D. 105 to A.D. 120. Many were the basic "fell boot" of the Roman military, a simple, high-ankle shoe without decoration. Other shoes found around the base were equipped with "carbatina," the Roman equivalent of Velcro. These simple shoes were worn by men, women and children and were easily laced and slipped on and off, Greene said. The shoes could also be tightened or loosened, extending their use for a growing child.

    In the centurion, or officer's quarters, archaeologists found two carbatina shoes with more-complex patterning than usual, again supporting the notion that higher-status parents dressed their children in nicer shoes.

    Only one shoe, an infant's that was found in the barracks, did not fit this pattern, Greene said. The sandal uses little leather, so may not have been expensive, but it does have decorative triangular tabs and rosette patterns unusual for the shoe of a soldier's child. Researchers aren't sure why this one odd shoe was in the barracks. [ Photos: Gladiators of the Roman Empire ]

    On the whole, however, the shoes show that families accompanied soldiers and had a role in military life, even from the earliest days of occupation, Greene said. What's more, their children were locked into their social class early on.

    "Even the infant children of the prefect were held to the expectations of dress according to one's class," Greene said.

    Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

     

     

    © 2012 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

     

     

  • Famed Roman shipwreck appears to be two

    Hellenic Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities and WHOI

    The Antikythera wreck is famed for the massive number of artifacts pulled from the site over the past century. Here divers explore the site.

    By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience

    A dive to the undersea cliff where a famous Roman shipwreck rests has turned up either evidence that the wreck is enormous — or a suggestion that, not one, but two sunken ships are resting off the Greek island of Antikythera.

    "Either way, it's an exciting result," said study researcher Brendan Foley, an archaeologist at Woods Hold Oceanographic Institution who presented the findings here at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Seattle.

    The Antikythera wreck is famed for the massive number of artifacts pulled from the site over the past century. First discovered in the early 1900s by local sponge divers, the wreck is most famous for the Antikythera mechanism, a complex bronze gear device used to calculate astronomical positions (and perhaps the timing of the Olympic games). Numerous bronze and marble statues, jars and figurines have also been pulled from the wreck. The ship went down in the first century B.C.

    Remote wreck
    The wreck is perched on a steep undersea cliff in water too deep for standard scuba gear. The undersea landscape also makes deploying remotely operated submersibles impossible, Foley said. In 1976, Jacques Costeau led a diving expedition to the site. Since then, it has been unexplored, thanks in part to its remote location in the strait between Crete and Peloponnese.

    "This place is absolutely unspoiled," Foley said.

    Led by Aggeliki Simossi, the director of the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, Foley and colleagues from Greece and Woods Hole watched footage and pored over logs from the 1976 dive. With so many artifacts already taken from the site, they knew there would be little evidence of the shipwreck exposed on the ocean floor. They'd have to match the underwater geology to find the wreck.

    In October, diving with technical scuba gear and diver propulsion vehicles that look like underwater fans, the team found the sweet spot, marked by a scattering of amphora, or large curved jars. [See Photos of the Antikythera Shipwreck]

    Intact artifacts from the wreck were spread over a huge area, about 197 feet long at depths ranging from 114 feet to 197 feet, Foley said. That's large for an ancient shipwreck, Foley said, suggesting either a huge ship or perhaps more than one wreck. The findings are preliminary, Foley said, but the team may have ultimately been excavating 984 feet away from the site explored by Cousteau. If that's the case, he said, they may have found a separate wreck — likely part of the same fleet as the original wreck that went down in the same storm.

    More secrets
    One reason for the researchers' uncertainty is the fact that they used Costeau's Antikythera expedition videos to gauge where to anchor their boat. Since some of the shots in the video were almost certainly staged, the researchers can't be sure they weren't diving at a site hundreds of yards away from the site explored in 1976.

    Either way, the wreck site has many more artifacts to offer, the researchers found. They pulled one jar to the surface, which will undergo DNA testing to determine its contents. They also recovered two components of a lead anchor, which itself was resting on top of other artifacts, suggesting it was on deck when the ship went down.

    "What else could be down there?" Foley said. "Are there more pieces of the known Antikythera mechanism? Is there another mechanism down there?"

    The researchers plan to return to the area next year and will use metal detectors to check the site almost 1,000 feet away where Costeau's team may have really been, he said. There are no artifacts visible on the ocean floor other than the spot that Foley and his colleagues explored, but metal detectors should pick up on any remnants under the sand at the other site if there are in fact two wrecks. [The 7 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds]

    What's more, the technical scuba gear may also allow archaeologists to dive deeper and more extensively in the future, Foley added. The dream, he told LiveScience, is to find an "undisturbed Antikythera," or a significant wreck that hasn't been disrupted for decades.

    "Because the site has been so intruded upon for more than a century it gets really hard to disambiguate what's myth and what's fact," Foley said.

    Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook& Google+.

      © 2012 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.