More than 100 leather shoes and other archeological artifacts on display in a new exhibit at Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, co-curated by Western classics professor Elizabeth Greene, offer a rare look at daily life at the edge of the Roman Empire.
On view for the first time ever in North America, the collection comes from Vindolanda, a Roman auxiliary fort and settlement just south of Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland, England. The site is part of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire UNESCO World Heritage Site, known for ongoing excavations that continue to reshape what we know about ancient life in the United Kingdom.
"When you take even your first few steps at Vindolanda, you immediately realize how special a site it really is. You get a vision of how people lived and who lived there. It all comes to light," said Greene, Canada Research Chair in Roman Archeology.
Unearthing Vindolanda, the new exhibition that opened May 7, transports visitors nearly 2,000 years back to the historical site, which is home to thousands of Roman leather shoes meticulously uncovered over the past 50 years. Greene co-curated the exhibition with Barbara Birley, curator of the Vindolanda Museum. Elizabeth Semmelhack, director and senior curator of Bata Shoe Museum, coordinated the exhibition with the Vindolanda Trust.
"Through this exhibition, we really hope to bring Roman Britain, and Vindolanda specifically, to a much broader audience," Greene said. "The Vindolanda Trust operates on the principle that 'archaeology and history are for everyone.' That is the ethos of what we wanted for the exhibition too."
Greene, who has excavated at the site since 2002, specializes in Roman frontier life, particularly the role of women and families in military communities. She leads the Vindolanda Archaeological Leather Project (VALP) and the Vindolanda Field School, a five-week experiential learning experience for Western graduate students. She has also analyzed thousands of preserved Roman shoes with her international research collaborators.
"Everyone can relate to shoes," Greene said.
Thousands of preserved shoes
At Vindolanda, leather shoes and other everyday objects have reshaped how historians understand Roman Britain.
"The shoes were the first thing that made us pause and say, 'wait a minute, there were a lot of women and children here. It wasn't just soldiers,'" Greene said.
That shift in understanding comes from the sheer scale of what has been recovered.
"Nearly 5,000 shoes, recovered to date, are in different states of repair," Greene said. "But remarkably, many remain exceptionally well preserved. Materials are preserved at Vindolanda that you don't find at any other excavation site. Leather, textiles, wood and bone are preserved exceptionally well."
Those conditions allow for an unusually intimate view of Roman life. And this level of intimacy is central to the exhibition.
"The shoes give us a really intimate kind of vision of what was happening on the site. They allow us to say a lot more about the individual people," said Greene. "We wanted to tell a story with all of these individual pieces. And ask the question: 'How would we tell the story of Vindolanda through shoes?' And I think we've answered the question with this exhibition."
The exhibition moves through different aspects of life, from work, to military duty, to domestic spaces, grounded in what people physically wore. For visitors, the connection can be immediate.
"You're staring at something that somebody wore," she said. "You just think all in one moment of the person who wore that. You really feel as close as you possibly can to the people that you're studying."
A sample of the collection on display at Bata Shoe Museum. (Jeff Renaud/Western Communications)
Unearthing Vindolanda also arrives in Toronto with urgency.
"We're racing against time," Greene said. "These leather artifacts, organic materials that have survived for nearly 2,000 years thanks to stable conditions, are now at risk as those conditions have steadily deteriorated over recent decades."
Climate change is altering the environment that preserved these artifacts for centuries through extreme weather, heavy rain and severe drought. The consequences are already visible. Collagen, the primary structural protein in animal hides, is critical to preservation or degradation of Roman leather artifacts like the shoes found at Vindolanda.
"The collagen bundles are breaking down, and we're not seeing the kind of preservation we did 10 to 20 years ago," Greene said.
That makes exhibitions like Unearthing Vindolanda more than a display. They become a way to preserve and share fragile evidence of everyday life from centuries ago - before it disappears.
"Shoes are emotive," Greene said. "They make people think about the people that were once there, the people that are now lost."
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