Straw Sandals Project

Straw Sandals Project Dedicated to the collection, preservation and study of plant fiber woven footwear in human migration, settlement and civilization.

These sandals from the Philippines, listed as Ph6 in the Straw Sandals Project collection, were purchased from Ebay stor...
08/29/2019

These sandals from the Philippines, listed as Ph6 in the Straw Sandals Project collection, were purchased from Ebay store Violetville Vintage. According to the seller, they were made in the 1940s and have not been worn. During this time period, handmade shoes and sandals were purchased by U.S. servicemen in the Philippines as gifts for wives and girlfriends back home. Another popular shoe for gifting had heels carved with village scenes such as Ph5. So, many of these items ended up in the United States. They are approximately size US 5-6.

It is rare these days that I find straw sandals from a country not represented in our collection. I still search on-lin...
08/14/2019

It is rare these days that I find straw sandals from a country not represented in our collection. I still search on-line and recently I found a straw sandal from Tibet. So now we have Tibet 1 entered into the collection. I will be writing more about the origin of this sandal soon but I wanted now to introduce it to our Friends of the Straw Sandals Project. I bought Tibet 1 from an eBay store (cathy19) and I had several exchanges of messages with the owner to learn more about these sandals. They were purchased by a cousin during a biking/walking tour in the mid-1970s that included Tibet. As I will explain in more detail in the piece I am writing for the SSP website, the cousin’s path followed the southern border of Tibet where the elevation is relatively low and eventually the cousin encountered the Yangtze River in Tibet. Rice is grown in this part of Tibet and sandals are woven from the rice stalks all along the Yangtze River where rice is cultivated. The cousin then likely followed the Yangtze into China. These sandals look a lot like the sandals from the Yangtze Basin region of China and it is going to be fun to do the phylogenetic analysis to learn where the Tibetan sandals fit into the story of the development of the sandal weaving cultures of present-day China. As my colleague Barry Hall would say, Don’t try to guess, just run the program!

I have posted a news item on the Straw Sandals Project site about an article published in the 3 November 2017 issue of S...
11/14/2017

I have posted a news item on the Straw Sandals Project site about an article published in the 3 November 2017 issue of Science magazine about the migration of the first Americans. You can see from the Figure below that this article pulls together evidence for a coastal route. It is a very interesting article with implications for how ancient methods of sandal weaving and construction moved through the Americas as well.

My Straw Sandals Project intern of a couple years ago Nicholas Arisco has donated our first pair of woven sandals from M...
11/13/2017

My Straw Sandals Project intern of a couple years ago Nicholas Arisco has donated our first pair of woven sandals from Madagascar! Nick told me that they were made by one of the mountain tribes in the high plateau region of the island. It is a contemporary style sandal that is also used for 'formal wear' in the countryside. Nick is currently in a masters degree program at Harvard and is working on a malaria project in Madagascar. I am currently reading about the native peoples there and will do a news item for the SSP website soon.

Just updated the news post "A Sandal from Australia" at www.strawsandals.org, noting the similarity with some ancient An...
10/15/2017

Just updated the news post "A Sandal from Australia" at www.strawsandals.org, noting the similarity with some ancient Anasazi sandals from southwestern U.S.🤓

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