Specimen 12, Foot-Reliquaries, Late Screen Age. Recovered in matched pairs, always two, a symmetry the Ancients evidently could not bear to violate; a solitary such object, when we find one, appears to have been mourned, discarded far from any dwelling, as though its severed twin rendered it unclean.
The reliquaries were worn upon the lowest extremity of the body, which tells us at once how the Screen People ranked their own anatomy. That they armored the feet so elaborately, in woven hide and pressurized foam and cord laced through fourteen ceremonial eyelets, while leaving the head bare, confirms our thesis: this was a culture that worshipped downward, toward the earth it walked upon and would eventually rejoin.
Wear patterns are instructive. The sole thins first at the heel and the ball, precisely where a supplicant's weight would fall during the long processional the Ancients called, in their surviving glyphs, the commute. Some reliquaries show no wear whatsoever. These we take to be votive: purchased, adored, entombed in the closet-shrine, never once permitted to touch the ground. A people who owned objects solely to keep them pristine understood something about devotion that our own age has forgotten.
Note also the tongue, that soft padded flap bearing the maker's sigil, positioned to press against the wearer's pulse. We believe it recorded a vow.
The Screen People, then, were pilgrims who did not know their destination, binding their feet each dawn for a journey whose only certain terminus was the shoe outlasting the walker.
We find them, still, in the ruins: the reliquaries intact, laced, waiting, and of the faithful who wore them, not one atom remains.