Archaeologist Eric Poehler just keeps coming with the questions about Roman walking and feet. Today, he wanted to know the size of the Roman foot. In my last post, I'd kind of given up on the idea of figuring out foot size, since I didn't think I had any foot measurements. Then I remembered this morning that of course I have calcaneus maximum length. The trick was to find a formula using calcaneus maximum length to approximate foot size.
|Sandaled foot from the Augustan period (Met Museum)|
I did find what I was looking for, though, in literature related to lower leg changes in polio: Anderson, M., M. Blais, and W.T. Green. 1956. Growth of the normal foot during childhood and adolescence. Length of the foot and interrelations of foot, stature, and lower extremity as seen in serial records of children between 1-18 years of age. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 14(2):287-308. This article is helpfully available for free via PDF here. If you scroll through to page 306, there's a handy chart that gives you the percentage of the foot made up by the "calcified os calcis" (what we now simply call the calcaneus). Taking 18-year-olds (as the authors have concluded that the foot is no longer growing at this point), we find that the calcaneus makes up 30.2% (+\- .1) of the male foot and 28.9% (+\- .1) of the female foot. Spiffy!
Now, we take the maximum calcaneus lengths from the population I studied at the Imperial-era Casal Bertone cemetery, 2km east of Rome. The male average was 80mm (8 cm), and the female average was 75mm (7.5 cm). Using the power of multiplication, the average Roman male foot was 26.5cm, and the average Roman female foot was 25.9cm. If you want to go a step further (ha!), this means the average Roman male from Casal Bertone wore a US 8.5 / EU 42 shoe, and the average female a US 10 / EU 41 shoe. Boom -- calculating calcanei!
The female numbers seem too long, honestly, but I can believe the male numbers. If you recall my previous post, the average male stature from this site was about 167cm, and female stature was 157cm. So (using Imperial measurements now, sorry, but I'm American!) a 5'6" man could easily wear an 8.5 US shoe. But a 5'2" woman would not wear a 10 US shoe. I'm 5'9" and I wear a 10.
If there really aren't equations other than this to approximate foot size from calcaneal length, I suddenly have an MA project in mind for an interested student... And the correlations between bone length and shoes (as from Vindolanda) have lots of potential as well!