The revelatory power of hoards—both ancient and modern
Years ago, as I was helping my now-husband pack up his bachelor apartment mere days before our wedding, I came upon a large plastic tub in the closet corner. Inside, I was surprised to find . . . a cache of socks. Or, to use a more common term from the archaeological profession, it was a hoard.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology defines a hoard as follows: “a deliberate deposit of complete and/or broken objects buried in the ground at one time for subsequent recovery or as a symbolic act. Hoards of metal objects are especially common during the European Bronze Age, and several different types have been recognized: for example, merchant’s hoards, founder’s hoards, personal hoards, weapon hoards, and votive hoards.” As this definition recognizes, different kinds of hoards exist—different types of items, different degree of financial value, and stored for different purposes. While this particular collection was not buried in the ground, what I found hidden away in a dark closet was most assuredly a “personal hoard.”
There were white socks and black socks. Crew-length athletic socks and ankle socks. Dress socks and hiking socks. Winter socks and summer socks. Plain socks and textured socks with that subtle pattern that some men’s socks have for reasons that defy reason. But the one thing that all of them shared was their uniqueness. Not a single sock in this entire tub had a mate.
Few things can make an archaeologist’s heart beat faster than finding a hoard of objects that someone lovingly, painstakingly curated centuries or (in my field of study) millennia earlier. Coin hoards in particular tend to hoard all the headlines. In part, this is because of the precious metals involved—if you are going to bury a treasure for later, you will make sure that this is indeed valuable. Second, the coins in hoards tend to be in the best shape possible—again, this is related to the first reason. And third, coins can reveal new historical information about ancient politics (in addition to commercial factors).
For instance, one hoard found in Oxfordshire contained a coin minted by an otherwise unknown Roman emperor—one Domitianus, who ruled very briefly in 270/271 CE before getting promptly assassinated—a common enough occurrence in the Roman Empire during the tumultuous third century. Aside from minting some coinage, it appears, the poor guy didn’t even have the time to leave a documentary footprint.
Fine. We can agree on the value of hoards of coins or, say, loom weights or armor. But what is the value of a hoard of socks? Other historical evidence for collecting objects only highlights further the exceptional thought process involved in storing such mundane textiles, assuredly not meant to assist their owner in times of scarcity or societal turmoil, whether it be economic, political, or military. But people are strange, as history reminds us. Getting to our historical subject’s motivation is always risky. Without the subject’s overt explanation of motives, anything we propose is mere educated guess.
As a historian of the ancient world, I find it both gratifying and confusing to be able to interview live historical subjects. This situation was a case in point. Curious, I asked my intended about his unusual collection. Logical as ever, he explained: Over the previous decade at least, any time a sock got lost in the laundry, he saved its mate, in the hopes of recovering the missing sock someday. He could not truthfully remember exactly when he began this practice. But at some point he had made that momentous decision, and the tub of orphaned socks began its steady long-term growth.
It would take a lot of lost socks—and their partners who were left behind—to fill up an entire storage tub. But there we were, wondering what to do with this unexpected witness to a quality that I had hitherto not observed in my beloved: a relentless optimism.
For it takes true optimism to believe that a sock once gone is not gone forever. Especially if the scenario repeats itself over the course of years, a decade even. How could one still have this faith that any given missing sock might yet come back, especially when cross-country moves intervene, as they did on several occasions in his orphaned-sock-saving journey?
But then, people are creatures of habit. Once he had made the decision to begin placing each orphaned sock in the tub, he could not stop. The rule had been made, after all, and as the proper first-born rule-follower that he is, he could not disobey that rule thereafter. Each object must have its proper place, after all. And each lonesome sock had to have its place too.
Of course, properly matched socks always go in the designated sock drawer after emerging from the dryer. But unmatched socks cannot go there alone. And yet, one cannot just throw away a perfectly good sock simply because it had lost its mate. What a waste that would be! Furthermore, in case you, gentle reader, are wondering, wearing mismatched socks just isn’t done. If this thought even entered your mind, it is clear that you are a rebel of a different sort.
But maybe there is another explanation afoot. It is not just our historical subjects in the distant past who hoard coins, loom weights, or any other valuables in case of disaster. Historians themselves are notorious hoarders—of books, papers, magazines, old and faded hand-written notes from a lecture they attended two decades ago, mildly crumpled handouts from a graduate school conference, church bulletins from ca. 2002, and a grocery list from four Thanksgivings ago. If it is on paper, a historian loves it. Dearly. Could this love of material remains of past historical moments, however seemingly insignificant, have influenced this sock-attachment?
That is a possible answer. An alternative explanation is that maybe socks are more precious than I, a daily sandal-wearer who until recently dwelled in the temperate clime of the American South, realize. Indeed, in the early second century CE, a soldier, freezing his toes while stationed on the Roman frontier in Britain, wrote a desperate letter home, begging for some warm socks. I bet that soldier would have loved to discover a cache of mismatched socks in great shape.
Still, archaeology also reminds us that while hoarding and socks are great separately, maybe the two do not belong together. In 1914 a lonesome child’s left sock from Roman Egypt was found on a trash heap in sufficiently great shape that its vibrant colors could be studied by modern scholars. It appears that 1,700 years ago, another wife and mother had the same reaction to an orphaned sock as I do today. Reader, she chucked it.
Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (forthcoming Nov. 2023 from Zondervan Academic). Her next book, Priceless, is under contract with IVP Academic. She is Book Review Editor for Current, where she also edits The Arena blog.
Image: Wikimedia Commons – This lonely ancient sock was excavated in Egypt at the end of the 19th century.