The Antikythera and the Bog Shoe

Hubby and I watched the fifth movie in the Indiana Jones series last weekend. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was released in 2023, so we’re only a few years behind.

A forewarning … if you haven’t seen the movie, there are spoilers in this article.

I noticed right away that the plot is super simple. There’s the background setup, where a younger Indiana and his archaeologist friend Basil Shaw manage to get half of an artifact, the Antikythera mechanism built by Archimedes, away from the Nazis. Jump forward to the 1960s, and Indiana is an old man, retiring from teaching college, and Basil’s daughter, Helena, appears to see if Indiana knows where Basil’s half of the Antikythera is. He does and shows her where it’s kept. Cue the Nazis, who have come to reclaim the artifact for Nazi physicist and NASA scientist Jurgen Voller, who needs this half of the Antikythera to match the other half, so he can go back in time and help the Nazis win World War II.

A global game of keep-away ensues, with motorcycles and a horse and sundry other modes of transportation. As the dead bodies pile up from the trigger-happy Nazis, you have to wonder where law enforcement is in all of this very open violence. Yes, yes, it’s a movie, and having law enforcement show up to question the Nazis and witnesses would stop the action cold, but honestly, a little verisimilitude wouldn’t hurt.

That verisimilitude would also help with the audience’s concept of archeaology. Sure, a lot of archeaologists practicing today were inspired to go into the field by watching the early Indiana Jones movies, but it is rare to find an artifact in pristine condition. Most of the artifacts in these movies are fully intact (aside from the pieces being separated for the sake of the plot) and relatively clean, even if they’ve been in a cave or under water for eons.

The true story of the Antikyethera is more interesting than what was conveyed in the movie. Yes, the Antikythera exists, but when it was first brought up with other artifacts from a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera in 1901, it looked like “a lump of corroded bronze and wood. The bronze had turned into atacamite which cracked and shrank when it was brought up from the shipwreck, changing the dimensions of the pieces.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism)

It took another couple of years for someone to notice there was a gear inside the lump and further studies over decades revealed the complexity of the mechanism, which is considered the first analogue computer. Its estimated age ranges between 87 and 205 B.C. It’s not a time machine, but it can predict eclipses and astronomical positions, and track the cycle of the Olympic games. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism)

When it was pulled out of the shipwreck, it was taken immediately to a museum, just as Indy was always proclaiming in his movies … “It belongs in a museum!”

Various scholars and scientists have been able to study the Antikythera and make models of it, enjoying the mystery of figuring out how it works. I can say confidently that they have enjoyed this work because I have watched the excitement of archeaologists as they discover and study even the most pedestrian artifacts. I have also felt the excitement of discovering new information about museum artifacts.

During my days at the Morrison County Historical Society (MCHS), I found a mislabeled artifact, which is not really that uncommon. Say someone brings in an item from a parent who passed away. They know it’s old, too good to throw away, and it must have some history, but they don’t know what it is. Whatever their best guess was would be entered into an accession record. In the 1930s at MCHS, these accession records were no more than a ledger with a list of artifacts with an accession number assigned to each.

This mislabeled artifact I found was a square piece of wood, maybe an inch to an inch-and-a-half thick, with a loose piece of metal that looped attached to one side. There were small spikes on this same side and the bottom of the wood was flat. The accession record identified this as a beaver trap.

I couldn’t see how a beaver would fit under the loop to get trapped. It was too small. I showed the piece to our director and she said, “That’s not a beaver trap. That’s a bog shoe.”

It was for a horse, not a human. Four bog shoes would be put on a horse to distribute its weight when it was walking through a bog, with the shoes preventing the horse from sinking.

I was so fascinated with this bog shoe and the fact that it was misidentified that I added it to my tour for school children, asking them to guess what it was. The kids who grew up on farms, especially those with horses, could often puzzle it out.

And this is what the Indiana Jones movies get right about archaeology. Figuring out the mystery or history of an artifact, especially one as complex as the Antikythera (or the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark or the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), can become a fascinating, lifelong obsession (hopefully, in a good way!) for an archaeologist.

With this post, I think I officially have an obsession with bog apparel. I have written about bog coats several times, and now I have written about a bog shoe!