This story appears in the June 2020 issue as "More Than Child's Play." Subscribe to Discover magazine for more stories like this.
The tattered leather slipper would have fit a child under the age of 10. Well preserved for footwear nearly 3,000 years old, it was discovered decades ago in the Hallstatt salt mine. Together with other small shoes and woolen and leather caps, also found deep beneath the Austrian Alps in the mine’s tunnels, the slipper would provide archaeologists with a key clue to life in Hallstatt during the Bronze and Iron ages, 2,600 to 3,000 years ago.
“We must conclude … children were regularly and in large numbers employed for underground mining,” wrote Fritz Eckart Barth, the archaeological site’s director in 1992, when the slipper was analyzed.
