I'm so grateful I got to have this experience. Be on the lookout for some cool hands-on history and STEM lessons already in the percolator.
All STEM Leads to Rome
Updates on the projects of my Roman Technology class - we reproduce the products, processes, and stories of the ancient Roman world through hands-on history projects, STEM labs, and experimental archaeology.
Saturday, July 12, 2025
My Top 5 in Ancient Roman France
I'm so grateful I got to have this experience. Be on the lookout for some cool hands-on history and STEM lessons already in the percolator.
Friday, June 6, 2025
The Year in Roman Technology: "Unhinged" Secret Messages
People always ask, "What do teachers do during the summer?" Some actually work. In fact, I normally work at my school's summer camp. This year, I decided to take a breath and sit down. It's been almost a week now, and I'm about to go crazy. LOL. Kinda. I've always been someone who can't sit still mentally...well, or physically. I'm researching two really cool projects for next year so I thought I'd share what I'm learning, as I like to do.
ANCIENT CRYPTOGRAPHY!!!! A few years ago, one of my Latin/Science Olympiad students approached me to tell me about his cryptography club at the library. Intriguing. He told me that he had learned about the Caesar Cipher, an ancient mechanism whereby Julius Caesar, the 1st century Roman general, encrypted his messages during wartime. I had never heard of it! Of course, he told me everything he knew, and I furiously wrote it down...thinking, "OHHHH, this will be a GREAT RoTech unit!" I immediately thought of that time in DE BELLO GALLICO where Caesar sends a secret message to one of his men using a spear. I ALWAYS wanted to know how he did it.
I've started reading these two works, and I'm having an absolute blast. Aineias, a 4th-century BCE Greek writer, wrote a work called How to Survive Under Siege. Lots of info here, but the most interesting chapter is all about hiding messages so that your enemy can't read them. If you're on TikTok, you've probably seen that trend where someone says, "Give me your most UNHINGED examples of blah, blah." Examples include nurses asking for ways to assist with difficult patients to teachers asking for ways to quiet a classroom. Well, this Aineias guy is something else!! Reading his encryption techniques is basically that TikTok trend: "Give me your most unhinged ways to hide a message that will evade the enemy!" Hold my beer: "Shave a slave's head, tattoo your message on his scalp, and then give him time to regrow his hair before sending him off." Like, WHUT??! "Scratch your message into a thin piece of lead, secretly slip it into the leather layers of a shoe heel, and then send off the shoe wearer. Unbeknownst to the shoe wearer while he's sleeping, the receiver of the message will retrieve the shoe, find the message, scratch his answer, and sew it back into the shoe."
Diepenbroek's work has been so informative as well. For example, I learned the difference between STEGANOGRAPHY and CRYPTOGRAPHY. In case you didn't know, steganography is "the practice of hiding a message within another message, an image, or an object, without giving the idea that a secret message is hidden in it." It's a broad term for LOTS of different types of messages, similar to the ones above. She also has a comprehensive list of ancient authors who use or talk about cryptography in their works.
I got so excited reading about these that I decided to try out the Caesar Cipher as a quick end-of-year activity with my students. I led them in creating a Caesar Cipher wheel, linked here. And then, they enjoyed decoding a few current brain-rot words that made them cringe like "THE RIZZLER". Their faces fell in true bitterness when they decoded BOOGER TOUCH - our favorite little game to play on Fridays.
Diepenbroek's book mainly discusses the Spartan scytale, a method of encrypting messages using a particular size of stick (trust me, the lesson on this one is gonna be SOOO fun) and how it gave birth to the modern cryptography movement. I'm excited to read it because in the modern STEM world, teaching kids to code at all ages is the rage. I'm excited to connect this stuff to the ancient world of Greece and Rome!
Sunday, May 18, 2025
The Roman Shoe Project: Worn Down
Today, I saw a meme on Instagram that pictured a group of tiny students. They were sitting on a classroom floor in front of an interactive board. One little boy was standing up clicking a button on the screen. The text at the top of the picture said, "It's May. Teach yourself!" I admit to laughing because I understand that bone-tiredness that all teachers get as we spend these last few days of school trying to keep our sanity in rooms full of teenagers who are just as "done" as we are. Indeed, we are "worn down" like some old Roman leather shoes...
But I have a few things I want to wrap up before I walk off into the sunset:
THE ROMAN SHOE PROJECT: We finished out the year by wear-testing our shoes on different surfaces (concrete and tile) and in different conditions (wet and dry). We found that the laces of our shoes need to be really strong to withstand the wear of regular tightening and putting on/taking off. We only wore our shoes for approximately 5 hours. In just that time, some of them were falling off of feet. The bottoms of the soles got very rough with just a little wear. During our hydraulics unit that ended the year, we got our shoes a little wet as we constructed and tested aqueducts and shadufs. Wetting the leather made it stiffer. Overall, we predicted that our shoes might last a few months in all with constant wear. No wonder there were so many SUTORES (shoemakers) on sight in ancient cities and forts - Romans must have gone through a LOT of shoes.
The shoes will now go home with their makers. Some plan to hang them on their bedroom walls as mementos of the year, others are excited to show their parents, and some will be leaving them with me to serve as shoe examples for future classes.
HANDS-ON HISTORY: Now in the middle of my two-year Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship with National Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions, I've met so many amazing teachers who do super cool stuff OUTSIDE. My own experiences working on large outdoor projects with my students (like the Penelope Project and the Roman Road Project) inspired me to develop a class that meets and works outdoors entirely. Since I want the students to explore ancient cultures of Louisiana and other places in addition to the classical world, I decided to call it "Hands-On History: Wisdom of the Ancients." In this class, we'll focus on place-based learning, partnering with the Indigenous tribes of Louisiana, the Louisiana Division of Archaeology, and the newly-built South Branch of the East Baton Rouge Parish Library down the street from our school. We'll be building a school garden and composting area and exploring an oral history project about a sheep farm that inhabited the land where the library is located, among many other things. We will continue to explore archaeology and the artifacts that have stories to tell about the people who made them, used them, and owned them, whose voices have long ago faded away. I'm hoping to write a lot about our projects and all the new things I learn as I prepare.
Thursday, April 24, 2025
The Roman Shoe Project: Digital Footprints
#1 on any list about Roman shoes should be Dr. Carol van Driel Murray's writings. Her many articles about ancient leather and thereby shoes made this project possible. Fascinating and specific, it's an opus that anyone else can only dream of achieving. So grateful to her for all the knowledge she has imparted, I emailed her to thank her in February. She replied that our project had made her day...and sent me more articles. Even though she's now officially retired, she retains a working Webpage with linked articles that you can access for free. I know I say this a lot to the point of sounding like a broken record, but if you admire the work of a particular professional, reach out. They love to talk about their work and to know that it's being used.
The place to start with van Driel Murray's work is her chapter called "Footwear in the North-Western Provinces of the Roman Empire," in Stepping Through Time: Archaeological Footwear from Prehistoric Times until 1800 by Olaf Goubitz. His drawings of Roman shoes really explained so much. Her description of shoe construction in this chapter was very detailed and helpful. (At $75, this book is expensive, but totally worth it.)
Although I read a LOT by van Driel Murray before we started this project, the most interesting details I learned were:
1. The Romans invented vegetable-tanned leather. Before they arrived, leather as we know it today (tanned to preserve it) did not exist (and it was not found in the archaeological record). When they left northern Europe, the knowledge and technology of the process seemed to have gone with them until it appeared later in history.
2. Before the Romans, shoes were quiet. I had never considered this aspect of shoes before, and it was a bit of a revelation. Roman soldiers wore nailed shoes that made a lot of noise when walking - this style of shoe spread to other non-military shoe-wearers because of their durability, but they got interested due to the noise they made, kind of like an annoying advertisement. The study of soldiers and shoes goes hand and hand.
To learn more about the process of tanning leather, read her Chapter 19 in Oleson's The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World (my RoTech Bible), "Tanning and Leather." An article I wanted to read but didn't get to was "Are we missing something? The elusive tanneries of the Roman period." In R. Thomson and Q. Mould (eds) Leather Tanneries: The archaeological evidence, 69–83. London, Archetype. You know how sometimes when you're studying something, your eyes are opened to a new world of joy...or as in this case, horror? That was my experience as I learned about the tanning process. Unfortunately, in some parts of the world, this process remains relatively unchanged from ancient times. This gruesome chemical process takes its toll on the lives of its workers.
In case you don't believe me about van Driel Murray's work, check out this bibliography of it. Yes, someone wrote an article about all her articles and chapters!
Next on the list of SUPER HELPFUL Roman shoe scholars is Dr. Beth Greene. A classical archaeologist at the Western University of Ontario, she has been a true inspiration for this project. Back in December of 2021, I watched an "Archaeology Abridged" lecture by her sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America in which she spoke about the incredible archaeological finds at Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall. I was absolutely TAKEN by this lecture. I mean, I knew about Vindolanda, but I was just not aware of its significance and its uniqueness. I subsequently joined in again for another lecture (this one sponsored by the Vindolanda Trust) specifically on the leather shoes found at Vindolanda. I also listened to numerous podcast interviews with Dr. Greene, and I started to amass the knowledge needed to begin the Roman Shoe Project.
A couple of years later, I applied for and secured a teacher travel scholarship in which I designed my own tour of Roman Britain. Of course, I included Vindolanda, and it was there that by the most brilliant stroke of luck, I spotted Dr. Greene at the open-for-public-viewing archaeological pit at the site. She had literally just pulled the sole of a Roman leather shoe out of the actual ground!!! I introduced myself and told her about my planned project, and she actually got excited - she said that she and her research assistant, Cheyenne Eversole-Spina, were developing lessons on Roman shoes that my students and I might be able to help with. I was thrilled!
Even though the lessons never really got finished (Cheyenne got super busy with her wedding and finishing her dissertation), Dr. Greene was extremely kind to speak to my students not once but THREE times. In addition, when I showed up to a webinar about her new book (with Barbara Birley) 50 Objects from Vindolanda, they sent me an advance signed copy with a lovely note inside: "Thanks for loving the Romans."
Dr. Greene's work was also very helpful:
1. She is the principal investigator at the Vindolanda Leather Project - she works at Vindolanda nearly every summer and is currently working on a book on Roman leather shoes.
2. The VLP contains this wonderful bibliography on Roman leather shoes.
3. This video of Dr. Greene explaining the different types of Roman shoes gave my students a solid overview.
4. Her article in Shoes, Slippers, and Sandals: Feet and Footwear in Classical Antiquity - "Metal Fittings on the Vindolanda Shoes: Footwear and Evidence for Podiatric Knowledge in the Roman World" hinted at an aspect of footwear that my students showed great interest in.
In addition to the people with knowledge of ancient shoes, I have to thank the shoe-maker with the practical know-how. I was introduced to Martin Moser, a historical shoe-maker and leather craftsman, on a Facebook group dedicated to historical re-enactment. His Website Res Rarae ("rare things" in Latin) is like looking through a treasure trove! I reached out to him via email, and he got back to me every single time. He was the one who suggested the simple carbatina for my students to recreate. I asked him countless questions about tools, patterns, leather, etc., and he never failed to share his knowledge with me with the greatest generosity. I even asked him to Zoom visit us, but he was nervous about his English speaking skills (he is Dutch). What a kind soul! I hope I get to meet him one day and thank him in person.
You might be wondering, "Nathalie, did you call any shoe craftsmen in Baton Rouge?" And the answer is YES, I did, because I figured they would be able to help us, even though we were working on ancient stuff. But none of them ever replied to me.
As you can probably tell, I needed a LOT of help on this project. This project was a lot of fun, but it also caused me some stress. I was SO worried about actually getting our shoes made, but as with all our projects, we got it done. Stretching our brains can cause some stress, but in the end, our brains expand. My only regret with this project is that I didn't make MY OWN SELF a pair of Roman leather shoes, y'all!! I can't even believe it. I got so busy helping the students (in fact, there are exactly three pairs of shoes I will finish sewing for three kids who were sick during sewing time and still don't have their shoes)...that I didn't take care of my own two feet. Sigh...one day. Happy trails, Roman Shoe Project!
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
The Roman Shoe Project: The HEELing Art of Shoemaking
I asked my Roman Technology students, "How many people can say they know someone who's actually made a pair of shoes?" Before I realized my mistake, they looked around with sly smiles on their faces. One kid finally said, "Uh, I know about 25!"
Our shoes are finally done! We started in January, missed a lot of days due to weather, field trips, and special events, and finished right in time for the end of the 3rd quarter. It was a challenging project for some of my students who lacked the fine motor skills necessary for cutting and sewing, but my helpful students refused to let anyone fall behind.
On Monday, we ended our Roman shoe unit by reflecting on what we learned. Most students were most proud of themselves for learning to sew. It was their first experience with this skill. Many students mentioned how much they enjoyed this project because it gave them the freedom to be creative while spending time chatting with friends in their class as they worked. When asked to reflect on the lives of ancient shoemakers, the students used words like "tedious, physically hard, and stressful" to describe the experience.
Our next step was to celebrate our shoes by having a fashion show. Of course, we had to use the Roman road as our runway. I mean, come onnnnn!! What better location?! For the show day, I asked the students to wear colorful socks so that they would show through the decorative punches in their shoes. It's thought that the Romans did the same thing in the colder climates of the northern empire.
Our next step will be to test the shoe construction on different surfaces. On some days we will wear the shoes to walk around our classroom and do normal tasks. On other days when we work outside (for our aqueduct STEM challenge), we'll be wearing them on concrete sidewalks. At the end of the 4th quarter, we'll look at wear patterns. To be clear, the Romans called these shoes CARBATINAE. They were meant to be worn as "slipper shoes" around the Roman house so we'll be stressing ours a little beyond their capabilities.
The Roman Shoe Project: SHOEperstars!!
Y'all!!! Our shoes are done, but before I share pictures of our runway sho(w)e (LOL, get it?), I wanted to talk about the long process of building before we slip on our shoes.
Step 1: Find a pattern.
My biggest fear about this project was not having a pattern for a shoe that we could easily reproduce. A shoe-making expert had sent me a picture of a pattern he uses, but a picture of a pattern is not a pattern. I knew I couldn't draw a pattern myself. I thought back to all the times I handled Roman shoe replicas at British archaeological sites in 2022 and wished that I had had the forethought to trace out one of those shoes into a pattern. But then in randomly searching around the internet, I found this simple pattern, and all my fears dissipated. I knew we could easily Romanize it, and I liked that it did not involve cutting out inner circles within the leather because younger students often have issues with cutting out intricate designs.
Step 2: Visit the experts in person.
My next biggest fear was ordering the right leather, but then I remembered my advice to others about a big project: go to the experts and ask them. Since the amazing Tandy Leather store that used to be on Government Street right near my school was no longer there, I visited the Tandy location in New Orleans. To be fair, few people today walk into a leather store and ask for advice in making 75 pairs of ancient Roman leather shoes so I wasn't expecting much help, but the Tandy expert was super knowledgeable and interested in our project. She showed me samples and gave me advice on what and how much to order. I'm so glad I took my own advice.
Step 3: Order the leather.
Put aside all feelings of your own personal vegetarian sadness and order the leather. This step really needs its own post because it was truly hard for me to learn about the leathermaking process. I became a vegetarian in the late 90s because I dislike the meat industry - it's bad for the planet, but I'll say this: after learning about leathermaking, I feel better for the animals (leather is really a byproduct of the much bigger meat industry), but I feel worse for the humans who work in it. More on this later...
Step 4: Receive a giant order of 8 leather hides.
After ordering our hides, I was shocked to receive them only a few days later out of Fort Worth, TX. Of course, they would come from there. Tandy Leather runs its headquarters out of Fort Worth, home of the Stockyards, a historic livestock market. The box was HUGE, and the hides, when rolled out, looked like...hides. I don't know why I was shocked by this. They were smooth and cool to the touch and had that leather smell to them. I ordered 4 black ones (dyed) and 4 natural ones (probably bleached a bit to give that buttery pale color.)
Step 5: Prepare the patterns.
Every student got a paper pattern to cut out and adapt to their feet. Kids with longer or wider feet had to expand the pattern a bit with extra paper and tape. Once done, they visited the leather cut-out station where I myself placed their pattern on the leather hides and roughly cut them out. This was the one job I felt I should do for them to make sure we used the leather wisely and did not run out. Our leather was expensive (a little more than $1000), and I wanted to honor the spirit of our leather.
Each student taped their paper pattern to their leather, and then they used a blue ink pen to trace their pattern on the rough side of the leather. (Not exactly Roman for sure, but we discussed how the Romans might have achieved this task.) This process was time-consuming. Once one shoe was traced, they flipped the pattern over, taped it down to the leather again, and traced it on their leather. This process allowed for a LEFT and RIGHT shoe pretty easily.
Oh my Zeus. This process seemed to take FOREVER - it happened around the time of the "flurricane" in Louisiana. When we returned from being out of school for a whole week, an endless stream of rescheduled events and special programs started up. Some days, only half the class was present. Some days, the whole class was present, but we only met for half the time. Some students can't physically use scissors. And yes, we learned that the Romans would have used very sharp leather knives to cut their patterns, but scissors were a much safer option for young students. Faster students offered help to students with less fine motor skills too.
In this step, students punched holes in the leather to pass their laces through, but they also decorated their leather. Some chose punched designs that surprised me with their intricacy. Others used stamps. We had learned about the stamped shoe found at Vindolanda that touted the shoemaker's name.
Step 9: Sew the heels.
Most of my students had never sewed anything before. In fact, in the final survey for the project, most students wrote that they were proud of themselves for learning to sew, a skill they knew nothing about until this class. Sewing leather can be complicated if the holes are not big enough for the needle to pass through as leather is sinewy. The Romans would have used animal sinew to sew their shoes. I had ordered some that I hoped we would use for this process, but the combination of teaching novice sewers to sew with a tricky "fabric" conquered my dream of authenticity. I ended up punching through every single pair of shoes with a multi-pronged awl to speed the process. Did my arm nearly fall off by the end of that day? Yes. Did it get the job done? Also yes. It's times like these that really help me to understand the physical work of ancient craftspeople. Once the heels had holes in the right places to allow for a flap fold in the pattern, students who picked up sewing more quickly had their shoes in no time at all. They volunteered to help their less experienced friends too.
This step went so quickly. In fact, I passed off my job of cutting leather straps to a "lace expert" student while I helped with sewing. As soon as heels got sewn up, it was nearly impossible for the students not to try on their shoes right away. As they would prance over with the shoes all laced up on their feet, I squealed nearly every single time. I seriously wanted to cry.
The beauty of this pattern is that it can be fit to any crazy-sized foot - slender, double-wide, super long. The lace in the front was easy to adjust.
Monday, February 24, 2025
The Roman Shoe Project: Tiny Animal Tracks
As my students learned to work leather in the beginning of our project, we read about this little mouse on p.91 in the new book 50 Objects from Vindolanda (I'll be reviewing it later this month) by Barbara Birley and Elizabeth Greene. The book is full of wonderfully intriguing objects that leave the reader wanting more.
I was shocked at some of the cuff patterns and designs my students came up with - they are infinitely creative so I took some cute pics of them. I was also shocked at how loud my classroom became when 25 students started banging away at leather stamps with their hammers. You can hear 7 seconds of that in this short video. Imagine that times 1 hour. Enjoy!
My Top 5 in Ancient Roman France
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On an early December Saturday morning, bleary-eyed, after waiting for 8 months, I woke up to check my scores. When I was able to finally log...
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I've been MIA from blogging for the past couple of months because this project has demanded my full attention. We have really been busy....
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I asked my Roman Technology students, "How many people can say they know someone who's actually made a pair of shoes?" Before ...