EBN- Archaeologists have found a 2,000-year-old caliga shoe belonging to a long-lost soldier in an ancient garbage pit during excavation work near the former Roman military and civilian colony of Aliso in Germany, news.artnet reported.
Scientists discovered well-preserved columns of an ancient wooden wall of soldier, according to a press release, as well as two pits that were once used as ovens to bake bread for residents, and a piece of glass for a toy. They then noticed two garbage pits nearby as well.
By searching the pile of trash with a built-in metal detector, they were able to identify the real treasure of the excavation – a soldier’s boot. “Why did we find a Roman soldier’s boot there? He probably threw it away because it was trash and he no longer had any use for it,” Tavrchover continues.
Soldiers wore such shoes to walk around in swampy conditions. These shoes were usually made of leather. Their soles were made of hand-forged nails that were hammered through three layers of animal skin, forming a sole where the pointed tips of the nails were pointing down and acting like walking boots. At the same time, their flat tops formed a solid foundation for the soldiers’ steps.
“Since the legionaries did not wear socks, running on the spikes in shoes that had worn down each sole was almost like a massage,” archaeologist Dr. Bettina Tremmel noted in the statement.
Although the caliga’s skin had long since decomposed in the sandy soil, archaeologists found that the arrangement of the 60 nails was still completely intact, making their identification almost undeniable.
The team removed the entire mass of earth containing the precious calyx using plaster, in order to recover it from the earth in one piece.
