Areni-1 Cave

Cool air meets you first. The heat of the gorge stays outside at the entrance, and inside the air turns still, dry and faintly dusty. Your eyes take a moment to adjust. The light from the mouth of the cave falls across a packed earth floor and fades into deeper chambers beyond. Somewhere below, the Arpa River runs through the gorge, and the cliffs around you glow red and ochre in the sun.

This is Areni-1, a limestone cave in Armenia's Vayots Dzor Province, close to the village of Areni. Locals also call it the Birds' Cave, because birds have nested in these cliffs for a very long time. From the outside it looks like many other openings in the rock. But in the early twenty-first century, this unremarkable hollow changed what we know about daily life in the Copper Age. The Copper Age is the period when people first began working copper, before the Bronze Age.

Serious excavation began here in 2007. An international team led by Armenian and Irish archaeologists, later joined by researchers from the United States, started to dig carefully through the layers of the floor. They expected to find tools and pottery. They found those, but they also found things that almost never survive. Plant remains. Textiles. Rope. Leather. Even human tissue. The reason for this lies under your feet, in the special conditions of the cave itself.

Think about what normally destroys the past. Moisture, bacteria, insects and changing temperatures break down anything organic within a few years. Here, the air is cool and very dry, and the temperature stays fairly steady all year. Over the centuries, thick layers of sheep and goat dung also built up on the floor. That sounds unpleasant, but it worked like a seal. It closed off the layers below from air and moisture, and so it protected what lay beneath for thousands of years.

Now for the first surprise. In 2008, archaeologists found a leather shoe in a small pit in this cave. It is about 5,500 years old, which makes it the oldest known leather shoe in the world. It is older than the Egyptian pyramids at Giza, and older than Stonehenge in its stone form. It was made from a single piece of cowhide, shaped around the foot and laced at the front and back with a leather cord.

The details of the shoe feel very human. It was stuffed with grass when the team found it. Researchers are not sure why. Perhaps the grass kept the foot warm, or perhaps it held the shape of the shoe while it was stored. The shoe is small, close to a modern women's size, although it could have belonged to a man or a woman. The original now sits in the History Museum of Armenia in Yerevan, far from the pit where it rested for so long.

The second surprise is even older, and it connects directly to the vineyards you passed on the way here. Deeper inside the cave, the team found clear signs of winemaking from about 6,100 years ago. There was a shallow clay basin, likely used for pressing grapes with the feet. The juice drained into a large clay vat sunk into the ground. Around it lay grape seeds, pressed grape skins, withered vines and pottery cups and bowls.

When the results were published in 2011, the site became known as the oldest winery found anywhere. Chemical tests on the pottery found traces of a pigment linked to grapes. The seeds belonged to the domesticated wine grape, the same species grown across the world today. So the people here were not simply gathering wild fruit. They were cultivating vines and producing wine in organised quantities, much earlier than many experts had believed.

Why make wine inside a cave? The answer seems to lie in how this place was used. Many of the finds point to burials and ritual, not to everyday living. Clay jars held human remains, and some of them contained skulls, often of young people. One of these skulls held something remarkable. The preserved brain of an adolescent, around 6,000 years old, survived inside it. Wine may have played a part in ceremonies for the dead, though nobody can say exactly how those ceremonies looked.

Look around the chambers as you move further in. The cave is not one single room. It has several connected spaces, and the excavated trenches and pits are visible in places, marked out by the archaeologists. Please keep to the paths. These floors still hold layers that have not been studied. The cave was also used much later, including in the medieval period, so each layer contains a different chapter of the site's long story.

Step back outside for a moment and take in the setting. The gorge here is narrow and steep, with red and brown rock above and the river below. This landscape gave the Copper Age community what it needed. There was water, fertile land along the valley floor, and a dry, protected shelter in the cliff. A little further up a side gorge stands Noravank, a thirteenth century monastery. Its red stone matches the colour of these same cliffs.

The village of Areni still lives from the vine. The local grape variety carries the village's name, and it makes a dry red wine with a light, bright character. You will see small wineries and roadside stalls selling wine and fruit along the road. In autumn, the village holds a wine festival with music, dancing and tasting. It feels natural here, in a valley where people have been pressing grapes for more than six thousand years.

It is worth pausing on that thread of time. The cups found in this cave and the glass you might hold in the village tonight belong to the same long tradition. Archaeology cannot tell us the names of the people who pressed grapes in this cave, or who stitched that small leather shoe. But it can show us that their concerns were familiar. They kept their feet warm. They made wine. They honoured their dead with care.

Before you leave, stand again at the mouth of the cave. Feel the cool air behind you and the warmth of the gorge in front of you. Listen for the river below and the birds in the cliffs. When you walk back down towards the road, look at the vines along the valley. They grow in the same soil, under the same sun, as the vines whose seeds rested here in the dark for six thousand years.