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Article Excerpt
Petr Hlavacek's obsession with odd footwear stops just short of his own feet. During the week we spent together, he always wore the same shoes: crepe-soled loafers, wide at the front for uninhibited toe movement and low at the heel to encourage good posture. Their uppers were of grayish suede, without insignia or decorative stitching, and were pieced together with a thick seam down the center. Their insoles were an experimental sort, designed for the tender feet of diabetics. They were the kind of shoe that would not have looked out of place on a medieval peasant. The kind, as Hlavacek would say, "that know what the feets need."
Hlavacek is a professor of shoe technology at Tomas Bata University, in the Czech city of Zlin. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on stitching--specifically, on the effect of high needle temperatures on thread quality in the making of leather uppers--and has mounted shoe research expeditions to Mongolia, Turkey, China, and Vietnam. He has measured the feet of twenty thousand Czech children and cross-indexed their growth patterns and deformities, and he has concluded that our feet are in trouble. "The number of incorrect and dangerous shoes is high. It is higher and higher!" he told me one afternoon in Zlin, over a bowl of garlic soup. Czech shoes were once the best-made in Europe, he said, but in recent years his country, like the United States, has been flooded with cheap, poorly designed Asian shoes, and the effects are showing. "The Czech Republic is nature's laboratory," he said. "You can give them Far Asia shoes and see what happens. And we have found that the number of complications is three times higher than twenty years ago. Half of all women have deformed feet!"
Hlavacek (his name is pronounced "la-VA-check") is fifty-five years old. He has a sturdy, companionably bulky build, like a badger's, with long, shrewd features and thick blond hair combed straight back. When he speaks English, he tends to add syllables to his words ("applicate," "observate") and to punctuate his sentences with exclamations, as if to mimic the elaborate endings and accents of Czech. "You look at the woman, she is full of pain. Who is guilty? Shoes!"
Listen to Hlavacek long enough and you may come to believe that shoes are responsible for a great deal--that human affairs proceed largely from the feet. "There is a shock when you realize what role shoes play in history," he says. Why did Alexander's armies conquer the world? Because they got shoes from the Persians. Why did Napoleon's armies overrun Europe? Because French scientists devised the most supple, sturdy leather for army boots. (Hlavacek thinks that today's soldiers, who do little marching, would be better off in sneakers.) One of the pivotal points in Middle Eastern history, he believes, came in 1956, when Egypt kicked British and French shoemakers out of the country. Eleven years later, when Egyptian soldiers fought Israel in the Six-Day War, the soles of their boots were held together with tacks. The farther they marched, the more the tacks heated up on the sands of the Sinai and drove through the leather, until the soldiers felt as if they were walking on red-hot nails. In pictures of their retreat, you see abandoned jeeps and tanks, and hundreds and hundreds of shoes.
Over the years, the plight of modern feet has prompted Hlavacek to develop a number of new shoe technologies, such as the insoles of his loafers. Mostly, though, it has led him further and further back, into prehistory. The majority of today's footwear is less ergonomic than Roman sandals of two thousand years ago, Hlavacek believes. And so, like a Renaissance scholar scouring ancient Greek texts, he spends much of his time trying to rediscover what his predecessors knew. In the past two years alone, he has analyzed a fifteenth-century German pilgrim's shoe, reconstructed a pair of ten-thousand-year-old sandals found in Oregon, and classified the shoe styles worn by angels in Byzantine religious icons. But the shoes that have taught him the most, the ones that first drew me to Zlin, are those worn by Otzi, the Ice Man.
Early one September afternoon fourteen years ago, two German tourists were hiking down a glacier in the Otztal, in South Tyrol, when they came upon a dead man, frozen up to his waist in the ice. He was emaciated and perfectly hairless, bent over a pool of meltwater with his arms propped beneath him, as if trying to wrench himself free. The hikers, Helmut and Erika Simon, took him for a mountaineer at first, as did local police when they came to investigate. But a team of archeologists at the University of Innsbruck soon reached a different conclusion: the body belonged to a Stone Age hunter, they said, who died in the valley more than five thousand years earlier. He was fully equipped and well armed--an axe, a dagger, a net, a bowstave, a quiver of arrows, and birch-bark containers were found in the ice around him--and when he died his corpse was naturally mummified by the glacier.
Otzi, as he came to be called, was subjected to countless scientific indignities in the months that followed. Excavators tore him from the ice with a pneumatic chisel, damaging his buttocks and one of his thighs; biologists probed his teeth for traces of disease and squeezed samples from his rehydrated colon to reconstruct his diet. At various points, they concluded that he was a vegan, a vegetarian, and an omnivore (his last meals were of cereals, ibex, and elk). He died of hypothermia or ritual sacrifice. When a stone arrowhead was found buried in his left shoulder, and DNA analysis identified the blood of four other...
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