Researchers find shoes and bags used by people in Oslo during the Middle Ages
Archaeologists have uncovered thousands of remarkably well-preserved leather items from the Middle Ages in Oslo.
A strap shoe with a low ankle. Shoes are one of the things archaeologists find a lot of in medieval excavations. In Bjørvika, the preservation conditions have been especially good.(Photo: Kirstine Møller Gray, Norwegian Maritime Museum)
The shoes, between 600 and 700 years old, are hand-stitched from leather.
Some of them are low and simple. Others have intricate patterns or elegant decorations. There are also taller boots.
These shoes are clearly well-used. People walked a lot in medieval Oslo.
And since shoes were expensive to make, it was important to take care of them.
"We can see that they've developed holes, and that these have been repaired in various ways," says archaeologist Marja-Liisa Petrelius Grue. "We see the entire life cycle of the shoe."
The wear patterns reveal where the leather bent with the toes and how the soles wore down beneath the heel and ball of the foot.
Holding one of these shoes in your hands is like connecting directly with the person who once wore it, the archaeologists write in a press release (link in Norwegian).
"It's like a footprint from the Middle Ages. A tangible trace of someone who lived, walked, and had a life in this city," says Grue.
Shoes, bags, and knife sheaths
Grue is an archaeologist at the Norwegian Maritime Museum. She leads the excavation of the so-called school site in Bjørvika, Oslo, in collaboration with NIKU and project leader Line Hovd.
In the small section of the school area designated for a basement, archaeologists have unearthed more than 2,900 items since starting their dig earlier this spring.
Over 80 per cent of them are shoes, bags, and knife sheaths – things made of leather.
"These objects were buried in thick, waterlogged clay lacking oxygen, so they are extremely well preserved," says Grue. "That has made it possible to find shoes and bags that would otherwise have rotted away long ago."
Previous excavations in Bjørvika have also found large quantities of shoes from the same era.
According to researchers from NIKU, it is almost impossible to dig even a single spadeful without finding remnants of shoes from the Middle Ages.
"You find shoes everywhere, in almost all the layers we go through," NIKU archaeologist Mark Oldham previously told Science Norway.
Many shoes were simple, but some could afford for them to be both practical and beautiful.(Photo: Kirstine Møller Gray, Norwegian Maritime Museum)
Decorated vamp on a shoe.(Photo: Kirstine Møller Gray, Norwegian Maritime Museum)
An especially valuable find
Of the 227 shoes registered so far from the school site, over 40 are children's shoes. This is an especially valuable find, says Grue.
"We don't often find traces of children in archaeology, so this is eespcially fun," she says.
Annonse
The find shows that children had their own shoes, sewn for small feet, and that parents or craftsmen spent time and resources to give their children proper footwear.
The children's shoes are made almost exactly like the adult shoes, using the same techniques, design, and materials – just in smaller sizes.
"They're very cute. We can see that some of them were used by many. They've been repaired many times, adjusted, and redecorated," she says.
A low children's boot with a strap. It corresponds to size 27-28 in modern shoe sizes and would fit a child aged 5-7 years.(Photo: Kirstine Møller Gray, Norwegian Maritime Museum)
Three children's boots. Numbers 1 and 2 correspond to size 22-23 in modern sizes, meaning they would fit children aged 1-2 years. Shoe number 3 corresponds to size 30, for a child aged 8-9 years.(Photo: Kirstine Møller Gray, Norwegian Maritime Museum)
Personally customised bags
People in Oslo also used bags during the Middle Ages. At the school site, archaeologists have found at least 20 parts of bags and purses in various sizes.
Only two of them appear to be the same.
'It therefore seems that the bags were customised according to personal taste, function, and available materials,' the archaeologists write in a press release (link in Norwegian).
A square bag with a flap. The holes in the flap may have served as a closing mechanism, or perhaps they were decorative.(Photo: Kirstine Møller Gray, Norwegian Maritime Museum)
Archaeologists found two pouches of this model. Metal detector scans show that they do not contain any coins.(Photo: Kirstine Møller Gray, Norwegian Maritime Museum)
The bags may also have had different functions, and there may have been many different producers. Some probably made their own bags as well.
Clothing at that time did not have pockets, so bags were important if you needed to carry things. Typically, they were worn on men's belts or tied into the bodices of women's clothing.
Perhaps this tiny bag was protection for an amulet or a cross? It could also have been a child's toy. The mini bag is 5x5 centimetres and made from a single piece of leather that is folded and stitched along the edges.(Photo: Kirstine Møller Gray, Norwegian Maritime Museum)
This may have been a pouch. There is clear stitching along the sides and bottom. At the top, there are slits, possibly for a drawstring. Maybe someone stored their coins here?(Photo: Kirstine Møller Gray, Norwegian Maritime Museum)
Archaeologists have also found many fragments of knife and sword sheaths, which protected the knives that hung from belts.
During the Middle Ages, knives were considered personal items that people carried with them everywhere, according to the archaeologists (link in Norwegian).
Three metres of the 14th century
The items at the school site were found in a cultural layer at least three metres thick, and the majority of the objects appear to date from the 13th-14th century.
In the top layer, the archaeologists found modern items, from the 2000s and earlier. Beneath that, they discovered items from the industrial era of the late 1800s.
And then, just below that – the 1300s.
"It's a bit strange, considering that this was a navigable riverbed at least until the latter half of the 1800s," says Grue.
"This is where the detective work begins. We've found all the evidence, so now we have to figure out how it all fits together," she says.
But the archaeologists do have a theory.
That the objects ended up here as a result of spring flooding from the Alna River.
Marja-Liisa Petrelius Grue with a coopered vessel.(Photo: Norwegian Maritime Museum)
This will eventually become a school. But there is still some work left on the archaeological excavation.(Photo: Norwegian Maritime Museum)
A rubbish heap near the river
"We think that these objects were likely thrown away near the Alna River," says Grue. "Many of them were used for a long time. We can see that from the repairs. Then they were discarded in a rubbish heap sometime during the Middle Ages."
This rubbish heap may have remained in place for quite a while. More precisely, several hundred years.
"When major spring floods occurred, they likely cut into the rubbish heaps and carried the objects away. That may have happened long after the items were thrown out. They could have been washed down there during the 1500s, 1600s, or even 1700s," says Grue.
Typology of shoes from the Middle Ages, created by archaeologist Erik Schia in 1987.(From Erik Schia 1987: 402-403)
Materials that float
The archaeologists had actually hoped to find boats, or even a ship.
That's why the Norwegian Maritime Museum is involved. So far, more than 80 boats and shipwrecks have been excavated in the harbour area of Oslo.
They did find some loose boat parts at the school site. But for the most part, it's been everyday objects from the Middle Ages. Lots of them.
"The density of finds has been much higher than we expected," says Grue.
And what they are finding supports the theory that the river brought the items here.
"Most of it is leather, but there's also wood and bone. These are the materials that float the most. There's very little glass, metal, or ceramics – those probably weren't carried here by the river," she says.
How do archaeologists know how old the items are?
So far, the artefacts from the school site have been dated using typology – in other words, based on the style of the shoes. Drawing on earlier studies into similar shoes, researchers can estimate when they were made. But there is a margin of error of a few hundred years, according to Grue. The shoes may have been used earlier or later than the 1200s–1300s.
If the researchers had found ceramics, dating would be easier – ceramic items are often linked to well-documented production periods.
In Bjørvika, dating is usually done using dendrochronological samples from wooden logs – the tree rings can show when the tree was felled. However, too few wooden items with sufficient rings have been found at the school site to allow this method, although the researchers do have a few pieces they will still try to test.
They also plan to send in some samples for radiocarbon dating (C14), but this method carries greater uncertainty than dendrochronology.
