Ebook Review - Footmarks

Footmarks: A Journey Into Our Restless Past by Jim Leary

Footmarks is a fascinating look at human movement and travel. The author Jim Leary is a professor of archeology at the University of York in the UK. His particular interest is in the importance of travel in the daily lives of people across time.

I have a fondness for books about travel (as opposed to "travel books"). Some of my favorites focus on a single journey, like Rinker Buck's The Oregon Trail, or William Least Heat-Moon's River Horse. Others are meditations on the meaning of travel in the lives of the authors, like Robert Moor's On Trails or Robert MacFarlane's Ghostways.

Footmarks is most like Moor's book. Both books cover many of the same themes, and both are very well written, with very readable prose. Leary doesn't write like a stereotypical professor - he has a way of blending humor with stories from his own life. And the humor and the stories make the archeology and history of travel come alive.

Topics and timeframes in the book are wide-ranging. Leary takes a look at prehistoric footprints. He puts us in the shoes of the Romans, for whom walking was "a very social activity, just as it still is in modern societies". We walk with Otzi, the neolithic iceman. Later, we skate on icy rivers in medieval times, and then walk to distant pastures with livestock, in prehistoric times and right up to the edge of the modern era.

Along the way Leary challenges some of our thinking about those who came before us. Were hunter/gatherers really traveling great distances in search of game? Are agrarian societies really less mobile than the hunter/gatherers? Why is it that today, in our highly settled societies, we actually travel more than at any time before?

One of my favorite parts of the book is the chapter on wayfaring, and how people found their way in the time before maps. Without maps people needed to understand the environment they were passing through in order to find their way. They would "discover [their way] as they travel along the path, creating an act of continuous remembrance, much as musicians remember a song or a piece of music by playing it." I love that thought.

Earlier I compared this book to Robert Moor’s On Trails. Published in 2016 Moor's book is a meditation on restlessness and exploring, on what makes a trail and why people traverse them. The two books share a lot in common, but where Leary's book is framed by archeology and set mostly in the UK, Moor's book is framed by his love for hiking and set mostly in the US. Moor's is one of the best nonfiction books I've read in the last 10 years, so that gives you some idea of why I found Leary's book so fascinating.

I picked this book up on a whim as I was skimming through titles on my Scribd app. I'm very glad I did. I enjoyed this book immensely and can recommend it to anyone who enjoys stories about travel - adventuring, hiking, exploring. I’d go so far as to say that anyone who enjoys a good walk will appreciate this book.

RATING: Five Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐