Episode 042: Elizabeth Greene

Dr. Elizabeth Greene, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Western Ontario, holds the Canada Research Chair in Roman Archaeology. Her work on Roman ruins near Hadrian’s Wall in northern England looks at everyday objects like leather footwear. History is written by the winners, they say, and as a result, the voices of women are often left out of historical narratives. But by looking closer at the archaeological record, Dr. Greene has been able to discover a lot more about everyday life in Roman society. It’s an approach to history that challenges our assumptions about how the world works.

Transcript

Cameron: My guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Greene, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Greene holds the Canada Research Chair in Roman Archaeology. Her work on Roman ruins near Hadrian's Wall in northern England looks at everyday objects like leather footwear. History is written by the winners they say, and as a result, the voices of women are often left out of historical narratives.

But by looking closer at the archaeological record, Dr. Greene has been able to discover a lot more about everyday life in Roman society. It's an approach to history that challenges our assumptions about how the world works. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Beth, welcome to the podcast!

Elizabeth: Thank you so much for having me.

Cameron: It was a pleasure to find your work online and to see the kind of work that's being done in Canada on Roman history. So I'm fascinated by that connection between your own work and this ancient history at a time when our own world is changing so much.

Taking the time to look back 1800 years or more seems like a rare perspective. So I'm really interested to learn more about what you're doing.

Elizabeth: Thank you. Yeah, it is an interesting perspective, particularly as you say, at a time when we're so sort of jumbled at the present. It's sometimes very nice to look back and see a longer trajectory of human history and events and accounts of things. And it's particularly nice for me, I think, to look at this social aspect of the Roman Army.

In other words, I'm not terribly interested actually in the battles and the armor, but more how does this huge army that is associated with the Roman world, with the Roman Empire, how does it operate? How does it change people's lives? What does conquest mean? And those sorts of things that kind of help us understand a little bit more about the humanity rather than who's fighting where and wearing what.

Cameron: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Our history books are filled with the roles of leaders and warriors and they don't always teach as much about everyday life.

Elizabeth: Right, right. And in fact, with the Roman Army, there was a large contingent that moved around with the military. We've always known, there was this group that we've always called camp followers that would be associated with the Roman army. And they always had this very pejorative kind of characteristic that they, we're living in sort of shantytown-like settlements and this sort of thing.

But what a bunch of us have been doing for, I don't know, about 25, 30 years -- I've only been on the scene for about 15 years on this work -- is to really kind of rehabilitate that group and understand deeply what this daily life is like for not only the people who are non-combatants, we call them these days, people who are associated with the military, but also the soldiers themselves and what a soldier as let's say a husband or a father, a family man, you know, what that means actually. Because in reality, the Roman army wasn't living in war zones. They were an army of occupation, meaning there was a whole lot of time spent where nobody was in battle with anybody else.

And really, we need to understand this as a community, as a particular social community in the Roman world, to understand that period in history and how that turns into something we would recognize in the medieval period and so on and so forth through time.

Cameron: Mm-hmm. Well, you sent me four pieces of work to look at and they range from 2013 through to a more recent paper in 2020, and then on to a grant proposal, which helps us understand the work that you're currently doing.

So I, I want to just take these kind of in chronological orders so people can get a sense of how your research changes and evolves as you get to know more about the field. The 2013 book chapter is called "Before Hadrian's Wall: Early communities at Vindolanda and on the northern frontier." So this is looking at the archaeological record at this fort near Hadrian's Wall in northern England prior to the establishment of the fort itself. So looking way back when the Roman army was still mobile. What do you learn by looking that deep into the past?

Elizabeth: Well, just a little clarification first. It's not so much that they are not built. It's sort of simultaneous with the construction of the fort. And the reason why this is really interesting, so one of my favorite conclusions (if I'm allowed to have a favorite conclusion from my own work) from that piece is that we see already in the very first period of settlement, so as you say, when there's still an army on the move... and the way to think about that at Vindolanda is that they are coming to this frontier. The Romans, the Roman army is sort of settling this frontier, consolidating it, and they're building forts. And a fort like that, that's going to be part of this defensive system is erected Vindolanda.

And one of the most exciting things is that even in that very earliest period, we find the shoes that belonged to women and children who were at this time associated with this occupying army. And why that's so exciting was that we never really imagined these individuals, these non-combatants, moving along with the army in periods like this when they're just moving into a newly occupied area, when they're sort of settling.

We've always seen this as a more volatile time period and it's been okay to consider the women and children and those families moving in later in the second century when things were a little bit more settled in the Roman Empire. We can picture this period of the Pax Romana, this more peaceful period.

And that's just simply not true. We have families and we have this social aspect of the military on the move all the time. And in fact, if we just look at our texts, our ancient texts from authors like Dio Cassius, or Tacitus, we do read about those individuals who are together with the military, who are non-combatants, who are family members, and in all statuses as well, from the elite, all the way down to your average foot soldier.

It seems that not every single person would be married or defacto married, but they would have those families along. And so we have to remember to bring them into our reckoning of the Roman Army and what that army meant, moving around and occupying areas and whatnot in the Roman Empire.

Cameron: So let's talk about what you physically find at these sites that indicates that there are family members there. What are you looking at?

Elizabeth: Yeah, this is really exciting because we don't always think about this kind of material. So at Vindolanda, we have around 5,000 leather shoes from all occupation periods, starting in about 85 CE, so that's when the site was first settled and, built and we've got a fort and a settlement, and right the way through, we have shoes right the way through, the fourth century.

So we find them in defensive ditches where they have been discarded, in the early periods, meaning Period 1 through 5, and that dates to about 85 CE to about 130 CE when they're constructing Hadrian's Wall and things are shifting and changing on this frontier.

Those levels at Vindolanda are preserved in what are called anoxic conditions. It's an oxygen reduced environment, so without any bacteria, you have the preservation of things like leather, wood, bone preserved in very good condition and even metals that would normally be much more corroded are actually in perfect condition coming out of this. So, leather shoes. So no other site has 5,000 leather shoes and once those started to be looked at very carefully, in fact, before me, a fantastic researcher named Carol Van Driel-Murray -- who I'm very close with now, and our work really kind of dovetails together -- she started looking at the Vindolanda shoes and saw that you have in the barrack blocks even, shoes that belong to women and children suggesting the occupation of families even inside of the fort itself at times.

Cameron: Well, this is really quite interesting because, when you think of the things that are preserved in the archaeological record, they're often stone or metal. So these tend to be, artifacts of war, for instance. You find an arrowhead and, maybe you might find tools, but very often it's associated with these kinds of battles and conquests and that colors our view of history.

But you're finding these much more quotidian sorts of items. So what you're saying here is that it's partly this environment that is preserving them. And I think back to some of the archaeological stories that I've read in things like National Geographic. You get these stories of, the Neanderthal who's been preserved in peat.

Elizabeth: Right.

Cameron: An intact specimen of an ancient person preserved because of those physical conditions where the oxygen doesn't get at the body. And so that's the same sort of thing that allows you to see all these leather shoes at this particular site.

Elizabeth: Right. Absolutely. In fact Vindolanda's a fully touristed site and everyone who comes up to the trench edge says, "Oh, is that peat?"

It's not exactly peat, but it is a very similar kind of thing. It's an oxygen reduced environment that preserves things very well. So yes. When you see the kind of the "bog bodies" and things like that, that some people are familiar with, as you say, from National Geographic.

Cameron: I, I'm, I'm glad to know that as an academic, I'm capable of asking questions on the level of the average tourist.

Elizabeth: [laughs] No, it's the most popular question. And it's a really good question though, because it is not normal to have so much leather. In fact, so I said we have about 5,000 shoes. In fact, we have 7,399 leather objects catalogued right now. And some of those include actually a big bag of scraps or something like that, or whole tent panels.

We have endless patches and we even have a small toy. We have a small toy that's in the shape of a mouse that looks like maybe had been something that a child used. But these shoes are really exciting for us because they are... you cannot, you cannot argue with the point of sexual dimorphism in the foot and the size of the foot tells us that there are children there, that there are women there, that we should be looking to bring those individuals into our reckoning of these groups.

And you're quite right when you said that so often, we focused in on those metal objects because that is what was preserved and it was so easy to, let's say, look at a spear point or any other kind of a ballista bolt head. We have all these different kinds of material remains.

Those were prioritized. Everything that was in the masculine sphere of the military was prioritized. And there were, even though shoes had been found here and there, we're not the only site with leather. There are actually a lot of sites in the northwest with leather. We are the only site with, 7,000 pieces of leather.

There aren't too many like us. There are thousands of shoes and leather finds from London, but from all over London, south in the uk. So Vindolanda really is the place where we can look at a range of shoes from different contexts and really get us thinking away from those spearheads and those ballistas and all of that equipment. Which is also interesting. And people write about that, absolutely.

But it's time I think now to move away and look at the objects, the quotidian objects, and try to understand what life was actually like on a daily basis, rather than those flash moments in time when you are throwing that sphere point, right.

Cameron: Moments of crisis.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Cameron: You're moving away from moments of crisis and looking at, at something that's quite intimate. Like anybody who's thrown out a favorite pair of shoes because they were just getting too old, knows exactly how much their body and their lifestyle has been imprinted on that object. So tell me about the kinds of things that you can learn from looking at this footwear.

Elizabeth: Yeah, that's so interesting. I'm glad you brought up the imprints of people because that's exactly what we're doing with the shoes, is we're using them as a proxy for the people. Right? We don't have 5,000 graves.

In fact, we don't have any graves at Vindolanda other than a few here and there that have been later or sort of deviant burials as we call them. The shoes are really the things that stand for the people. So one of the things we're doing right now, in fact, I have a master's student working with me who's doing some fantastic work. She's using 3D imaging to try to detect some of those footprints, those actual impressions of the person, in the leather that are not visible to the human eye. So a lot of that is coming out. We're right now using 3D structured light scanning -- and this is a great student named Maria Glanfield, who's doing some terrific work -- and we will be able to make a much better discussion around the wearer of the shoe. So the demography of the site coming out, and understanding whether this really was a child or a woman, or some of the details that we can maybe talk about. Also with the underside, the outer soul, we can see scuff patterns and wear patterns and this will help us understand, potentially, historical health outcomes from these shoes.

And I have another masters student named Casey Boettinger who's working on exactly that, the health outcomes that the shoes are allowing us to see, that otherwise would be completely invisible, through the use of podiatric interventions on shoes. So the Romans actually understood things like orthotics, for instance.

Casey's looking at the additions to some of the shoes, and this is sort of the start of the work I had talked about in my 2019 article. She's continuing that work to really bring out how the external parts of the shoes, with metal bars and added studs and all sorts of interesting features, are suggesting that people understood the correction for an individual gait.

So they can tell us about health, they can tell us about demography. They can tell us about fashion. As well. And fashion you might think is, say, "Oh, well that's just fashion." But actually that tells us a lot about the status of the individual wearer, tells us a lot about who is using what kind of space in the fort, whether it's inside the fort or outside of the fort. Who's discarding material where on the site.

And for instance I talk a lot about the children's shoes and the style of children's shoes from Vindolanda, and one of the things I've noticed is that the sartorial expectations for children on the site tend to, or they seem to anyway because of where certain kinds of shoes are found on the site... they may follow the expectations of the parents. And what I mean by that is that in a very important building called the praetorium, that is the commanding officer's residence. So this is the most elite family on the site. This is the family of the commanding officer. And what I found in there was that they have this type of shoe called a fishnet shoe that's a very intricate... the upper is cut out with all these little holes and you could actually have a nice bright sock underneath that would bring the color out. Those are definitely the kind of thing that adult males from this space are wearing. So the shoes that reflect an adult male wearer or owner, look like this.

“Fishnet” shoe from Vindolanda, worn by an adolescent. (Credit: Elizabeth Greene)

But then we also find them on the size range going down through your teenage years, and then all the way down to an infant, a shoe that is only 11 centimeters. And one of the arguments that I've made is that there would be absolutely no point in having these very high end shoes for particularly the infant, if there wasn't a public function or a public role for this kind of "first family," if you will allow me that phrase, within the fort.

There's no point in giving what probably equates... an 11 centimeter shoe is probably an eight to 10 month old or something, that is probably not really walking... a shoe that has a fully studded bottom with iron studs and this whole cutout patterning. That's a pretty high end shoe for someone who might not even be walking.

And so my argument is that we shouldn't see this family as being somehow not a part of the fort, sort of sequestered away, but rather in public view, perhaps part of military parades or perhaps part of other more official events that took place on the site. Now, I can't prove that for sure, but certainly all the archaeological indications are pushing us towards those sorts of conclusions.

Cameron: Mm-hmm. When we think back to these kinds of ancient times, my preconception would be that you just have a lot of functional clothing, a lot of functional footwear, and I don't think of artistry and style as being important considerations. Maybe in the capital, in Rome, but in these far flung outposts to find these indications of sartorial preference is really quite remarkable.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And in fact, thanks for bringing that up. What our listeners might not know right now is that in the capital, things like the type of shoe you could wear were actually legislated. There is sartorial legislation that says the senators can wear these red boots and equestrians wear these black boots and so on and so forth. The kind of ring one could wear is legislated. Who could wear purple on their toga is legislated. So the Romans very much cared about who was wearing what. This was the way that you quickly indicated who you were and what status you held. Now, I don't think that we need to imagine that every single day of a senator's life, they wandered around in these red boots. But it does suggest, it indicates very strongly, that on certain occasions it matters very much what you're wearing and what you were allowed to wear. It was very important. So when we see that all the way out here on the frontier, looking at the way these things are operating. Now, it's not terribly surprising within the military because the military is a very hierarchical organization, the Roman Army, and it doesn't surprise me at all that they would follow some of these.

Now what we are seeing out on the frontier is sometimes you have a knockoff, if you will. What's happening, these fishnet shoes, what strikes me is that you could wear a brightly colored sock underneath and you could pull that color out. So if you were looking to pull that red, you could do that with a shoe that's otherwise pretty functional, but yet has an element to it that allows for that kind of sartorial flare to come through.

Cameron: Well, your 2014 book chapter, which is called "If the shoe fits: Style and status in the assemblage of children's shoes from Vindolanda," you talk specifically about these territorial detail. And your remark there is that these visual cues help reinforce the hierarchical structure of military society.

And this is really quite curious because as you pointed out, this is the kids. So clearly they've got a public role to play. This is not some concubine who's hidden away and not spoken of. This is a family having a very prominent role in this society.

Elizabeth: Yes, absolutely. And that's something I've been trying to stress now for quite some time. So I said in the beginning that, we've always known that families were living in the extramural settlements, meaning the settlements that are outside of the fort walls.

We've always known that, but yet no one has stopped and taken the time to understand what that community was like, what that settlement was like, what those people's lives were like. Once we started doing that, the next question was, okay, we also have evidence for these individuals in the fort.

And that's where we really had, I think, more contentious debates. There's a lot of people still that don't want to see any place for women, children, families inside of the fort itself. They want all of that activity to take place outside. My argument and that of others as well, who've been working in the field for a couple of decades is that we can't just split this up, this whole space -- fort and extramural settlement -- that is the military community and we have to see fluidity around that space. It's not that there is a giant gate that says absolutely no one who is not a soldier comes in here. And we clearly have evidence inside of the fort.

And like I said, we don't need to see every soldier, every fort, every barrack block. We don't need to see all of these spaces being full of women and children. That's not reality, right? Every man doesn't marry, every woman doesn't marry. That's not the way it actually works. But we do need to start finding that space for them in our understanding of life in the Roman Army and how that community was also affecting the frontiers and the Roman provinces in that way.

Cameron: Tell me about the rooms where you do find shoes, because I noticed in some places you were finding, like, more than half the shoes in a given room or given building would be women and children. So how does that distribution of the women and children's shoes affect your understanding of what's going on in that community?

Elizabeth: Yeah, that's really interesting to look at, because there's always been this sort of argument or this kind of question mark really I should say, about whether there were spaces for married soldiers, whether we could call something married quarters. People started thinking about this sort of in the nineties and there were a few papers, and it's really hard architecturally to tell, to see this, because a building is going to have four walls and a room's going to have four walls and a floor.

And you can look at the artifacts, but often the artifacts that are left behind are kind of innocuous. They're not telling us one thing or another thing. The shoes really do that. And in fact, in that Period 4 barrack block, so the barrack block of the regular soldiers. We were talking about the praetorium before, which is that commanding officer's residence. That's going to be the very high end family on the site.

When we looked into the barrack blocks, and this is also something that Carol Van Driel-Murray first did back in the nineties. In specific rooms, we find a number of shoes having belonged to women and children. There are pairs in there as well, which is something that really indicates to us that this is not just leveling fill that's come from somewhere. What a lot of people want to say is, "Oh, well this has come from somewhere else and doesn't actually belong in the fort."

But a lot of our looking at the taphonomy -- that is, how the archaeological record has been created -- throughout the fort, things seem to stay very, very localized and we have pairs in there. Generally, if you were moving stuff all over the place, you don't keep pairs together, right?

Cameron: Right.

Elizabeth: Think about a landfill now you're not going to have, unless it's been in a bag together or something like that. So we have children's pairs, we have women's shoes that are coming out of the space, and they are clustered in certain rooms. So I think there is some indication, I think we can start to argue, that there may have been spaces set aside for married soldiers in that way. But also I will add here though, that we don't need to find the same situation in the same place everywhere.

Archaeology for such a long time, wanted to categorize everything. It wanted to say, this is how it is, right? We want to prove that this is how it is. But in fact, we're really in the last, 10, 15 years realizing that every situation is different. We really need to look at local contexts, because maybe Vindolanda had a lot of married soldiers, maybe the community there, something about where those soldiers originated.

Because I didn't mention, they're not Roman citizens. They are non-citizen soldiers who are recruited into the military. They're from areas of the Roman empire, from provinces, that did not have citizenship. And they get their citizenship only when they retire after 25 years, or when they serve 25 years, in the early days. Then they get citizenship and their children get citizenship. And this is something we know from these documents called the military diplomas that tell us that the state, in fact, the Roman state, is allowing these relationships to take place.

Because I think I also didn't mention that the Roman state legislated against marriage for soldiers. Soldiers were not legally allowed to be married while they were serving.

Cameron: I was going to ask you about that because I picked up on both of those in your papers. At one point you talk about marriage not being legal and in another place you're talking about these diplomas that grant them the right to marry. So could you clarify that for me?

Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely. So soldiers were not allowed to marry. We think under Augustus, the Emperor Augustus, maybe around 13 BCE when he's also putting together a bunch of other military reforms. We don't have a definite date on this. But somewhere in Augustus's time and then perhaps all the way up through into the third century.

At one point we thought that this marriage ban went away at around 197 CE. That doesn't seem to be true anymore either. So for, let's just say roughly 200 years, let's give it, or more probably, soldiers were not allowed to marry while they were in the military. Officers could marry. So we do have a legal situation with, for instance, I've talked about the officer's family in the praetorium. He was legally allowed to marry, but the foot soldiers were not.

So when I talk about things like the shoes coming out of the barrack blocks, that's even more interesting because those individuals are not allowed to marry. So I think that maybe I've also said the word defacto wives or defacto marriages. And what I mean by that is that social reality follows its own path, right?

It always does. We always have laws and then other things happen. And often, in many cases, the law is brought about because people are actually doing that thing and continuing to do that thing. And soldiers absolutely still created relationships. They had children. What I find very interesting is that the diplomas, so these documents that they get when they retire, when they leave the military, we have over a thousand of these things from all over the empire. They had belonged, at one point, to soldiers who have been discharged. And on there, not all of them, a good number of them, lists their family members. They list their wife, they list their children. Their children are given citizenship. And it has that right in the parameters of the document. This is what you are getting with this diploma and with your service to the Roman Army.

And that's really interesting to me because though the state legislated and said, you cannot marry, you are not allowed to get married, they don't care that they're creating these defacto relationships and having up to six children. The diplomas with the biggest families named six children. And then they in fact legalize them on the way out anyway, so they're accepting of all of that.

So there are different debates about why they don't allow marriage. I can see them not wanting to. Have to be responsible for dependents. Say, no, we're not going to pay you more because you're not legally allowed to be married anyway. So who cares if you have to support a family? We don't really know though.

We can't say with certainty why they kept that ban on marriage for so long. But that's also what makes this such an interesting subject and also why for so long the Roman Army, and Roman Army studies in modern scholarship, were so... were, were, if you'll allow me to say, a bastion of masculinity. I mean, all we talked about all day, I, I was in high school when this debate started coming around.

I was getting out of high school and moving into university when people started to finally say, "Wait, I think we've got women and children here too." So then when I went into graduate school, I jumped in feet first with this subject and yeah, it's been fabulous. I love it. It's really interesting and it brings together this interest that I have in the shoes and the interest that I have in the community, and I can bring those two things together because one speaks directly to the other, but now I can take the shoes and run with them and do all this cool 3D imaging analysis and all of these other neat things. So it's not all women and children all the time. But it does seem to be all shoes all the time for me.

Cameron: Right. Let me just deal with a couple of really simple things that you do cover off in your paper. I just want to make sure that I understand them. You deal with the question that, is it possible that these small shoes you're looking at are actually just shoes that shrank over time, and you've got some statistical research on how much shoes shrink...

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Cameron: ... and so forth. What's, what's going on there?

Elizabeth: I love this question. What sparks this kind of discussion is that for some time, I think I started to say this at one point in this conversation, for some time, even though we had a lot of good evidence that these individuals were, in fact, there in some numbers, perhaps inside the fort, it was very easy to say, " Oh, well that's probably just a stray find." So there's a great old fashioned archaeological technique, which is, "Oh, I don't want that to be there. We're going to call that a stray find." So you say that it's been...

Cameron: Yes, it's an outlier!

Elizabeth: Yes, it's an outlier. Exactly. So whenever things were found that really seemed to indicate the presence of women, for instance, or children but women especially, there were either -- there were two things that would happen -- either they were attributed to, not even the situation that in Roman terms we would call a concubine, but to sex workers. And yes, there were definitely sex workers. Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that everything we find that belonged to a woman, belonged to a sex worker in a military environment. Right. That doesn't make much sense either.

So it's about getting away from that notion, but also bringing us to accept what's there, what the archaeological record says, and evaluating it sort of Occam's razor, as it is, as it's presented to us. And the other thing that we were referring to is that whenever small shoes were found, there was an argument out there, and I've seen it on a museum label recently, that says that the shoe probably shrunk.

It wasn't a child. These shoes shrink when they come out of the ground. Now, yes, there is some truth to shrinkage, but all you simply have to do is find a shoe and then put it through conservation, and you can see how much a shoe will shrink, first of all in conservation, and that is really maybe about 3%. At the absolute max, what we're finding is maybe 5%. But this amounts to about a half a centimeter, maybe a centimeter at the most, but the shoes don't seem to shrink in the ground. If anything, they take on, if they're in a water logged environment, like if they're preserved down a well in a watery environment, they if anything actually bloat because they're taking in more water. But a shoe doesn't, a piece of leather doesn't actually shrink from something the size of an apple down to something the size of an apricot. It doesn't happen that way.

Elizabeth Greene crouching at excavation site

Cameron: Wow. You've also got some really curious stuff and you alluded to this already, but I want to get into a little more detail on it. And that's your 2019 book chapter that talks about metal fittings in the Vindolanda shoes. And you look at this as evidence that there's a body of knowledge around podiatry around gait and remediation of foot problems in that. What kinds of things you're actually finding on the shoes that tell you about this?

Elizabeth: Yeah, this is really cool. So what we're finding that suggests some sort of podiatric knowledge, some sort of remediation of individual gait issues -- problems, perhaps.

They're in the form of metal, extra metal added to the outer soul of a Roman shoe. So you have layers and layers of thick cow hide anywhere up to, gosh, I think the most I've seen, five layers of a thick cow hide you can have. Often it's just three. Three layers is common.

And you have some uppers that are sewn either entirely through in between those layers or just a seam going around the edge. So you have uppers that come up and the bottom, the outer sole, where we're walking around often on rubber or also sometimes leather, right, if it's a sort of fancier shoe, they're walking around for the most part on iron studs.

So a bunch of little tacks, kind of the size of, you know the thumbtacks that actually have a rounded flat head? Kind of like that. The size of that. Just dozens and dozens, if not over a hundred. On one shoe, you'll have rows and rows of tacks. Sometimes they're very decorative. Other times they're just utilitarian, and they're just in lines as many as you can pack into the area.

And sometimes they're very delicate, like on sandals especially children's sandals or women's sandals, they're very delicate and you just have a few little studs and they can be quite decorative. But, ultimately what they're doing is walking around on these iron studs. So what we're finding that's indicating some sort of podiatric intervention on that shoe, is added metal.

So in certain areas we'll see what I like to call a sort of home spun remedy that an individual said, you know what? I really need more support here in my, you know, upper left toe, right. And you can, you'll see a whole bunch of studs added and you can often tell that it's added because they work outside of a set pattern. So the set pattern might be as simple as straight lines, or it might be something more like a scroll pattern and quite decorative. Either way, when you see a whole bunch clustering in one area outside of that set pattern. It looks like that's something that's been added later.

The more official remediation that we find, however, is something that really, actually looks a lot like a 1950s orthotic. And that is a metal bar, like literally a metal bar, that's placed at the back of the heel. The biggest one we have goes almost all the way around the heel.

Some of them just are on one side, so basically to fix probably a pronation or a supination or something like that. We all have a slight pronation or supination, we all go one way or the other way. But if it's an intense problem, I suppose, you'll really wear down either the inside or the outside or one part of your shoe at an extreme rate. And so they seem to understand that. Now we tend to use internal orthotics, right? We put them inside of our shoes, but even as recently as the fifties, there were these external bars that you would put on shoes and maybe think of, like, Forrest Gump, right? Remember when he runs away? He's got these big shoes with these kind of clunky metal things on them, and the Romans seemed to have perhaps, I don't know if I want to say invented this, but like my MA student right now, Casey Boettinger is working on this and she's having a hard time finding a body of anthropological data from before.

So we might have the first. We have about 7, 8, 9 or so examples of these bars. We have many more examples of added studs. We have some studs that are actually facing up into the insole. So perhaps, what Casey's arguing might be pressure points, things like that, that in some way have a healing quality.

So it's a really interesting subject that's under investigation right now. In fact, we have a poster at the Archaeological Institute of America conference coming up in January and we're doing some work together on that right now.

Cameron: There's such interesting linkages here that tell us about the way that the society's organized, because you've got the evidence of hierarchy in the fashions and in the way that the shoes are collected in certain residences and so forth. But this whole thing about remediation of physical problems, and it's perhaps in some cases disability, indicates a different kind of an organization of society that does not abandon people to their individual problems, but tries to apply resources to include people and make them able to function in society.

Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's the way we need to see these two different aspects. Because it does seem as though the metal bars are a more sort of official remediation that at the time of the construction of the shoe, you need to be able to say, I've got this issue, I wear the outside of my foot, et cetera, et cetera.

And perhaps even with, maybe even with medical recommendation. We do know there are medical doctors associated with the Roman Army. The Romans certainly had, and the Greeks as well, a certain level of medical knowledge. So, we can see that, I think, as a more official remediation, whereas that one that I described where one is just adding studs to the bottom, that might be something that is more kind of home spun, right? That's somebody just saying, "Well, okay, I need to just get a little bit of support here."

Cameron: Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth: But there do seem to be the two levels of care. Yeah.

Cameron: You talk about the different roles of women in Roman military society at this time. Is there any indication that some of these alterations to the footwear would've been done by women? Is there any kind of an indication of gendered roles in the work?

Elizabeth: No. There's no indication at all. I'm glad you brought this up because we do have a space that has potentially been identified as maybe a leather working, maybe a cobbler space because of the tools, because of the leather.

And we are just starting to look at this very seriously, to really evaluate everything that has come out of the space to understand that. And now one of the interesting things, Vindolanda, like I said, we've got all that leather. We also have a lot of wood from the site, a lot of wooden artifacts, small wooden artifacts and timber remains that are much larger floorboards, the actual wattle and daub walls, which are these sort of timber framed walls that they had in this early periods of occupation. And one of the things that we have is in fact a workbench that is covered in... it looks the same size as a bench you would put out on your front porch or something.

And it is covered in marks that look very much, we think, they are tool marks from a leather worker because of the shape of the marks that have been impressed into the bench. And on that bench is also the name of the individual and it is a man. We think his name is "Ato," is what is actually carved into the bench.

So this is one of those incredible things that you find at a place like Vindolanda, that everybody else goes, "Really? You have all of that?" So we are not normally given names like Ato's. But in this case it does seem as though Ato is a leather worker because of all the punches that are in his bench, and he has put his name on the bench.

So that's an exciting thing. But that is literally the only piece of evidence. We have a couple of maker's marks on shoes. Two from Vindolanda, so outta 5,000 shoes, we have two maker's marks. One is a guy called Lucius Aebutius Thales. So this is a man.

There's some indication that he was working in Gaul, maybe. The name is Greek. Well, it's a combination of Roman and Greek. It's hard to say. And then we have one other one that has affinity with another... it looks exactly like a stamp that's found in York, in the UK, from the Roman period, of course. It's the exact same stamp, but so far we haven't really been able to read it because everything in it is nicely decorative, but it's also all abbreviated. So it's hard to know.

The connections that we do have to either leather working or to shoe making right now seem to be men. But there wouldn't be any way for us to know if women were the ones, taking charge of adding the extra studs to someone's shoes or anything like that. We can't say that.

Cameron: Hmm. Yeah. So you've got all this evidence of technology being applied to the footwear. I'm looking at your 2021 research grant proposal, and I'm seeing a whole bunch of stuff about the technology that you use to do the research, the imaging and stuff like that. So can you tell me about how these new tools are affecting your ability to do the work?

Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely. So the 3D imaging that we're using right now, we're looking at 3D structured light scanning. My master's student, Maria Glanfield, is working on this and one of the things we started to think about with this huge assemblage is, "Wait a minute, wouldn't it be nice if we could make much better connections between the actual owner, the size of the foot, the type of shoe they're wearing, this sort of thing." And the reason that we couldn't make those connections as closely as we would like is because a shoe, as we all know, is always bigger than the actual foot that's wearing it. And oftentimes we have a big issue with the fashion, right, the fashion style that's in. So think about sort of a 1950s, I think it was from the fifties? Or when were people wearing Winklepickers? They're very, very pointy. Or, you know, just a woman's heel that is very pointed at the front. We couldn't say whether somebody was actually really jamming their toes into the front there. But often they're not. Right. Often you've got several centimeters at the top that don't have anything to do with the size of the foot, but rather just the fashion of the shoe.

So what we wanted to start doing is really trying to see if we could find those impressions that you cannot, except in the most exceptional circumstances, see with the naked eye. You can't just look at a shoe and see it, in 98, 99% of cases.

So, this MA student, during COVID, we were stuck, right? We couldn't go over to Vindolanda, we couldn't go to England, we couldn't do anything. So she said, "Well, let's start thinking about how we might be able to visualize this." And I sent her off the first COVID summer and said, "Hey, look. You're interested in 3D imaging and archaeology. Just research everything that we could use to expand our knowledge of Roman shoes and Roman leather, just anything and everything."

So she spent the entire summer, came up like 120 page document for me, that was everything we could possibly use. So what we are using, she came down for her MA thesis work on 3D structured light scanning, which we've applied to a number of shoes. We've got about 85 shoes from Vindolanda. We were finally able to get back to the research site last summer. And we scanned all of those very closely. And when Maria puts those into different post-processing programs like MeshLab, things like that, she can start to actually pull out those impressions. So we're seeing the footprints. Instead of just measuring the shoe, the insole from top to bottom and the widths and things, we're actually getting the impression of the foot that was in that shoe, rather than just that insole.

So that's really exciting. And then we also work with a physical anthropologist. Our collaborator is Trudy Buck, who's at Durham University in the UK. She plugs this all into these great, interesting studies -- for instance, in forensic podiatry, in physical anthropology -- about foot size, foot measurements, foot widths and lengths and whatnot, and what that indicates about sexual dimorphism, about who's leaving these footprints behind.

So we have a big team. There's a whole bunch of us who come together with our own expertise on this, and it will hopefully, fingers cross, give us some fantastic results.

So we're right at the beginning of this 3D imaging analysis, but it's already, I think, paying off in a big way. It's looking really interesting. Maria is finding the sole impressions that we want to find. It's going to be really fabulous. So that's sort of a "watch this space" and have me on the podcast in another three, four years and we'll update you on what we found.

Cameron: I'd love to. So this podcast is about academic research and why it matters. So let me ask you that question, like, why does this research matter? In what ways does it matter?

Elizabeth: Well, I think that what we're trying to do here is take a body of material. So I won't say a sort of quotidian body of material because not everybody has 5,000 shoes and I realize that, but take a body of archaeological and...

Cameron: imelda Marcos did.

Elizabeth: Right, right. You know, I'm surprised we got all the way to the end and we hadn't yet had an Imelda Marcos comment. I get them all the time.

We're taking this body of archaeological material and we're asking everything we possibly can of it. We're trying to get everything we can from it, and the reason why that's important is because right now archaeology is being abused. Archaeology and history is being abused by a lot of groups that want to make it say what they want it to say. For the Roman world and the medieval world as well, people, there are certain people... not many academics, not any academics I know, but there are people who want to show, for instance, the whiteness of Europe and starting with Rome, and therefore the whiteness and the superiority of whiteness in the world today. And what most of us know is that that is completely wrong. But when one takes history and they use it to suit their ends, it can be a huge problem. What we're doing -- it can be, It is a huge problem -- what we're doing is diversifying that. We're pulling everything we can out to say, "Look, we've got women, we've got children." The bioarchaeologists are saying, "Look, these individuals are actually originated from North Africa." We've got images that suggest, "No, you've got Palmyrenes who are living on the northern frontier of England." So there's a lot of work that's happening right now that is really showing, that is helping everyone see.

We've always known this, but we didn't know we needed to say it because we didn't know... or so loudly, I guess. We didn't know we were fighting against the abuse of history, and particularly the Roman world and the medieval world that we really need to rail against. So this is just one piece of that, saying, "Let's look at how this body of material, like the Roman shoes at Vindolanda, can really help us to diversify our understanding of the past.

We've got women, we've got children, we've got people of all different sorts here. Let's make the very most of that. So it's a bigger picture and it's a bigger problem, but you know, it's a little piece of that, that's really combating these issues in modern scholarship. It's not scholarship, is it, when people are abusing the past?

Cameron: No, but, but it does have to do with the structures of knowledge and the structures of power and the relationship between those two things. The kind of work that you're doing is deeply critical because it allows us to see that there are important exceptions in the record, in historical evidence, that we have tried very hard to ignore in order to maintain that dominant storyline. And you're pulling away at the foundations, the assumptions, of that body of knowledge in a very important way.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And I think it's really important for all of us to question these things that we think we know, right?

We need to say, "Is that real? Does our evidence actually support that?" And I mean, think about this, think about whoever can control the past, they can make the story work to their advantage and their benefit. So something like using a radically transparent way of looking at the past and understanding every element that's there, that is going to be incredibly important as we go forward.

People want archaeology to be... they romanticize archaeology. They want archaeology to be apolitical. They want it to be just something where we don't have to worry about the problems of today. But in fact, whoever controls that past, whoever controls that story, has a huge amount of power, and it is political. Archaeology has always been political.

I don't have to go into 19th century colonialism and the role of archaeologists in controlling archaeological sites in places like North Africa and the Middle East. It's always been political and it still is. It's not romantic, it's not Indiana Jones. And we have a job ahead of us to use archaeology and use history to chip away at things that we think we know. Chip away and ask questions and keep questioning our evidence and see our biases, and understand where we've gone wrong in the past and how we can fix it in the future.

Cameron: That's a lovely note to end on. I'm going to stop right there. Thank you so much for giving me a tour of the wonderful work that you're doing.

Elizabeth: Excellent. Thank you so much for having me. This is wonderful.

Elizabeth Greene doing fieldwork

Links

Elizabeth Greene’s research website with links to all her research papers and book chapters

Websites for Vindolanda historical site and the Vindolanda Archaeological Leather Project

Video by Dr. Greene on Vindolanda’s Roman shoes

Research profiles for graduate students Maria Glanfield (3D imaging) and Casey Boettinger (podiatric knowledge)

Credits

Host and producer: Cameron Graham
Photos: Elizabeth Greene
Music: Musicbed
Tools: Squadcast, Descript, Audacity
Recorded: November 25, 2022
Location: Toronto and London, Ontario