The Utah Museum of Natural History is a wealth of ancient Utah artifacts. The museum staff’s job is to discover secrets hidden within the depths of antiquity.

One set of items is keeping its secrets hidden?ancient moccasins.

In the 1930s, a U professor discovered the collection of several hundred moccasins in a cave in Utah’s Promontory Mountains and brought them to the museum.

“They looked like cow pies,” said Sarah George, museum director. “They’d been buried for thousands of years.”

The shoes?as well as tools used to create them and one mitten?remained in the museum’s cavernous vaults until recently. Last spring, the museum got a Save America’s Treasures grant and has been restoring them since then.

“What we’ve done is reshaped them so we can study how they were made,” George said. Technologies that were not available when the moccasins were discovered have made the restoration possible.

“We’re like a library. We have lots of materials that are archives and they’re available when people want to study them,” she continued.

Upon examination, the museum found the shoes’ creators had used porcupine quills, rather than European beads. The museum suspects the cave may have been a primitive factory or some kind of gathering place. The museum, however, doesn’t have a clue who made the moccasins, though.

“We hoped that the structure of the moccasins would give us clues, but we’re not sure,” George said. “They’re worth further study.”

George hopes that, in a few years, the museum will learn who the moccasins belonged to, noting “Science marches on.”