There are 9,000 year old sandals on display in a museum in Portland, Oregon and most people walk right past them on the way to something else.
At the Oregon Historical Society Museum if you go up to the third floor, just inside the gorgeous multi-media exhibit presentation of Oregon’s beginnings and history, there is a small dark glass case towards the back, which holds host to a pair of some of the oldest shoes ever found in human history.
For me, this display was one of those that I stared at for a while and it brought me to tears. It’s one of those artifacts that you can just so clearly see the human behind them, and it made me feel so deeply connected to our past.
Looking closely at the sandals you can see the discoloration and the imprint from when these belonged to someone who wore them enough that the shape of their foot impressed upon the material permanently.
The shoes on display are part of a category dubbed Fort Rock style sandals, named after where they were first found: Fort Rock Cave in Oregon, United States. “Fork Rock” is now considered a distinct style of footwear found specifically in southeast Oregon and northern Nevada.
These ancient handwoven sagebrush bark sandals are considered to be the oldest directly dated footwear in the world, and the pair within the Oregon Historical Society Museum are dated to be over 9,000 years old.
If you look closely you can see the beautiful braiding that’s been preserved for an incomprehensible amount of time, braided and woven together by humans not so different than us.
Just as interesting as the the sandal discovery themselves, is the context in which they were found.
Anthropologist Luther Cressman from the University of Oregon first discovered these sandals in 1938, but he didn’t just discover one pair. What he found inside the Fort Rock Cave was a significant cache of shoes, nearly 100 in total!
The variation in sizing of the sandals found – from child sized to large adult sizes – in addition to the vast majority of the cache being heavily worn, caked in mud, or broken has lead to the interpretation of this find as a discard area.
Remarkably well-preserved due to being buried in volcanic ash, when they were carbon dated after the development of the practice, the fibers from this find dated from 10,400-9,100 years old.
For Portlanders and visitors, the Oregon Historical Society Museum is absolutely worth the visit. If you’re a resident of Multnomah County, the museum now has free entry with proof of residency! It’s an incredibly well-curated museum and they have various rotating exhibits, so there’s always something new to see.
And if the sandals really caught your interest… the majority of the collection of Fort Rock sandals are located at the University of Oregon Museum of Natural & Cultural History in Eugene, Oregon (including the pair dated to be the earliest in the cache at over 10,000 years old).
References
“Fort Rock Sandals.” The Oregon Encyclopedia, May 1, 2014. https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/fort_rock_sandals/.
“Sandals Drawings.” Sandals Drawings | Museum of Natural and Cultural History. Accessed August 8, 2026. https://mnch.uoregon.edu/collections-galleries/great-basin-sandals/sandals-drawings.
