Areni-1 Cave
This cave produced the oldest leather shoe on Earth and the oldest known winery. The part nobody repeats is what stood beside the wine vat: storage jars with the heads of adolescents inside them, and one skull that still held brain tissue.
Field Guide Entry
In 2008, excavators digging under a layer of sheep dung in a cave above the Arpa River lifted out a complete leather shoe, radiocarbon dated to about 5,500 years old, with its grass stuffing still in place. It is the oldest leather footwear known, and it was made for a right foot, size 37.
In 2010 the same team, directed by Boris Gasparyan with Ron Pinhasi and Gregory Areshian, found a wine press cut into the floor, a clay vat set below it to catch the juice, grape seeds, desiccated vines, and residue that tested positive for wine. Published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2011, it is the oldest known winemaking facility, roughly 6,100 years old.
What was next to the vat
The winery was not in a kitchen. It was in a mortuary chamber.
Set into the floor around the pressing area were large storage jars, and inside three of them were human skulls. They belonged to adolescent girls, and the cut marks indicate the heads were removed after death. One of the skulls retained preserved brain tissue, which makes it the oldest human brain matter ever recovered.
Nobody has explained the arrangement. The straightforward reading is that wine was being made as part of a funerary rite, and that the vessels held the dead as part of the same ceremony, but the specific act of placing the heads of teenage girls into wine-storage jars has no parallel and no accepted interpretation.
Still being dug
Work continues at the site, and the deposits run deep enough that the sequence covers thousands of years. The dry, stable conditions inside are why organic material that would have rotted anywhere else survived here: the shoe, the vines, the tissue.
Visiting Information
Open roughly 9am to 6pm from April through October, with reduced hours in winter and occasional closures, so it is worth calling the Yeghegnadzor tourism office before making a special trip. Entry is around 1,000 AMD, with on-site guides available for 2,000 to 3,000 AMD more, and a guided visit runs about 40 minutes.
The cave sits directly above the M2 highway between Yerevan and Goris, and the walk up from the road is short but steep.
The shoe, the jars, and the other finds are not here. They are in the History Museum of Armenia in Yerevan, so seeing the objects and seeing the place are two separate trips. Areni village and its wineries are minutes away, and Noravank monastery is about 15 minutes further. Armenia carried a US advisory of Level 2 as of 2026, with the Azerbaijan border region excepted and far from here.
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