Went to college around the area and worked for some of the tribes up there. Very interesting... mystery or something, I remember the the news around the 2019/2021 incidents.
kitd 16 hours ago [-]
Fascinating story.
One thing that I don't understand though. The theory is they washed up a local river, got embedded in sediment and are only now being released. Given that, I would have thought their condition would be much worse. More likely that they were well-packaged on the wreck and have only just been released ?
tokai 9 hours ago [-]
>More likely that they were well-packaged on the wreck and have only just been released ?
No not at all. Embedded in sediment would preserve them better.
jawilson2 5 hours ago [-]
Like bog shoes?
13 hours ago [-]
brabel 15 hours ago [-]
The leather on those shoes are in nearly perfect condition! How can that be possible??
jandrewrogers 15 hours ago [-]
Likely anoxic or anaerobic conditions where nothing decomposes. It isn’t that uncommon in nature.
mr_toad 13 hours ago [-]
I wouldn’t call those near perfect. Parts have clearly rotted away.
cyberax 15 hours ago [-]
Leather can survive for surprisingly long time in anoxic environment. E.g. in a swamp.
CaptainDecisive 13 hours ago [-]
Not only for a surprisingly long time, but also in surprisingly good condition. For example at Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall archeologists have found not one or two, or even ten but over 5000 amazingly preserved Roman shoes that were apparently thrown away into the fortress's moat and survived buried in the mud <https://www.vindolanda.com/Blog/the-curators-favourite-shoes>.
Hilariously they're never found a pair of shoes, only singles. So that's why they think they were thrown away as rubbish, because one shoe broke so they threw it in the ditch. In the museum on site there's a fantastic "wall of shoes" on display where you can see the amazing leatherwork from 2000 years ago <https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/37305>.
mapt 8 hours ago [-]
My prior understanding was that before the industrial revolution dramatically reduced the labor costs, clothing was expensive. Most people only owned two or three outfits, and replacing one would cost a month's wages sort of expensive.
How could one afford to throw away a perfectly good non-matching shoe?
em-bee 8 hours ago [-]
they threw away the broken one after replacing it with a new one. they didn't replace the good one.
when shoes are hand made it makes sense to not make them only in pairs if only one shoe is needed
Wowfunhappy 2 hours ago [-]
Why not fix the broken one?
Maken 6 hours ago [-]
Looking at those mesh-like patters in the shoes, makes me wonder how long each one took to be made.
still mad that when discovery took over hbo, they axed that amazing show.
b112 14 hours ago [-]
I'll give a more gruesome reason.
They were attached to corpses, and the corpses are starting to completely decompose. Now the shoes fall off the feet. It could even be a local disturbance, such as something feeding on the corpses (crabs, etc) after the silt receded.
defrost 14 hours ago [-]
That's reasonably probable save for "and the corpses are starting to completely decompose".
The geology of the island of Great Britain is such that it has a steady rate of coastal erosion .. a number of villages once inland "far" from the sea have been lost to the sea.
Old churches and their graveyards are lost, previously unkonown mass burial pits are exposed as cliffs erode away and the remains (bones, clothes, shoes, etc) are lost to the water sometimes before it's even noticed.
Possible, sure. On balance, given the large numbers all at once, the theory about old shipwreck cargo being breached and freed has somewhat more weight.
mr_toad 13 hours ago [-]
If it was a graveyard you’d also expect many artifacts of different eras, not just Victorian era shoes.
defrost 13 hours ago [-]
Period specific mass graves aren't uncommon in the UK - plague, flu, killed in battle, etc.
INTPenis 13 hours ago [-]
Read the full story, we're talking hundreds of shoes. And we have a record of a cargo ship carrying shoes sinking 150 years ago.
personaly,having found very old shoes, harness leather, beaded moccasins, and other probable organic artifacts, beach bone anyone? in a variety of useualy anoxic or acidic situations, I can then extrapolate, that these are common things to find if a person takes a moment to examine and confirm
that they are historical artifacts, and all in all the top 10 to 100 feet of most of our planet is a good place to look for direct evidence of past human activity, use a microscope and now 100% of the planets surface has an artifact.
thewanderer1983 13 hours ago [-]
How about some local performance that recreated shoes from the Victorian period. That ended up in the ocean?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discover...
One thing that I don't understand though. The theory is they washed up a local river, got embedded in sediment and are only now being released. Given that, I would have thought their condition would be much worse. More likely that they were well-packaged on the wreck and have only just been released ?
No not at all. Embedded in sediment would preserve them better.
Hilariously they're never found a pair of shoes, only singles. So that's why they think they were thrown away as rubbish, because one shoe broke so they threw it in the ditch. In the museum on site there's a fantastic "wall of shoes" on display where you can see the amazing leatherwork from 2000 years ago <https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/37305>.
How could one afford to throw away a perfectly good non-matching shoe?
when shoes are hand made it makes sense to not make them only in pairs if only one shoe is needed
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ASr0n5LnWnU
They were attached to corpses, and the corpses are starting to completely decompose. Now the shoes fall off the feet. It could even be a local disturbance, such as something feeding on the corpses (crabs, etc) after the silt receded.
The geology of the island of Great Britain is such that it has a steady rate of coastal erosion .. a number of villages once inland "far" from the sea have been lost to the sea.
The villages of Clare and Foulness succumbed to erosion in the 15th century, that still continues to this day: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwvj80yg40o
Old churches and their graveyards are lost, previously unkonown mass burial pits are exposed as cliffs erode away and the remains (bones, clothes, shoes, etc) are lost to the water sometimes before it's even noticed.
Possible, sure. On balance, given the large numbers all at once, the theory about old shipwreck cargo being breached and freed has somewhat more weight.
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy84ezd4421o