Vindolanda 2025 - Day Six

I spent last week working on a couple rooms of a long infantry barracks.  4th century on the top, 3rd on the lower layers.  This week, something different.  Sitting on top of the north end of the barracks is an odd, jumbled pile of rough looking stones.  It's.....something.

 

It is more or less round.  The stuff off to the left is plain old dirt.  On the right it is set on top of the barracks structures, which like everything the Romans built, were made with straight lines and right angles.  Well, lets say almost everything the Romans built was like that.

Here's one exception.  Vindolanda has a large series of these round structures.  The purpose is a mystery but they were built in the time of the Severan campaigns and may have held British loyalists to the Imperial cause.  Or prisoners.  British folks lived in round houses after all.

Ah, but this critter is several layers higher, and probably a couple of centuries later, so not likely.  Well, how about.....

Late Roman and post Roman churches had rounded sides.  This is one from the other end of the site.  Certainly a candidate.   Not too many other possibilities exist.  Sometimes Roman work shops would have a rounded apse.  Probably where the forge or furnace was.  It's a odd thing to look for in a probable Post Roman context, but as it happens the technology involved in making iron into nails and weapons survived into the Dark Ages.  

So.....I'll update when I can, but at the end of the day's work something interesting did turn up to suggest an answer..........

Vindolanda 2025 - Day Five

Brilliant sun to finish out the first week.  I've spent the whole time working on a side by side pair of infantry barracks rooms.  Can't say I've found much, just bits of pottery.  Oh, and I guess this:

Sometimes you find bits of iron totally rusted onto a floor surface.  I suspect this was the point of a knife....or an arrow head.  A proper arrow head was found a couple of rooms over.

This one was in a post Roman, aka Dark Ages context.  It's a design that has changed very little over a very long time.

Otherwise it was just cleaning floors.  2nd century floors,  3rd century floors....just bashed up floors in general.

Time for a weekend of diversions.  I'm not accustomed to working in bright sunshine and warmth.  Takes a bit out of ya.

Vindolanda 2025 - Day Four

The atypical perfect weather continues.  I find this disturbing.  Can't say I've ever seen a forecast here with 0% possibility of precipitation.

I've continued to sort out the details of the barracks room I've been in since the start of the week.  It has been bashed about quite a bit since between being built in the 3rd Century and being beaten up by plows in the 19th.   I'll skip the technical details and just show some.....things

Low grade artifacts:

Pot Lids, just bits of flat stone or broken pot that are shaped into round to cover some sort of vessels.  Pottery? Wooden bowls?  Who knows.  The supervising archaeologist hates 'em and lets her Mediterranean passions fly when I bring her one.  I try to look apologetic..

Foolishly I went and found a second.

Pseudo artifacts:  People sometimes ask why we don't use metal detectors on site.  The roughly one million nails in the ground are one reason.  Another is iron stone.  Sort of a low grade iron ore that forms nodules.  By surface appearance and weight these appear to be iron artifacts.  This one at least had a soft "core" that gave away the game.

Small, very small artifacts.  Too tiny to even get a picture of it but with two minutes to go in the digging day I spotted a tiny bit of blue glass.  It was a broken bead.  I was rather pleased that my 68 year old eyes picked it up.

Not everything on site is that difficult.

Vindolanda 2025 - Day Three

My idle hours reading is "Emperor of Rome" by Mary Beard.  She's a good writer and is describing what it was like to be in charge of the Empire at the peak of its power.  

What we are digging in these days is at the opposite end of things.  Not Rome, but the absolute farthest frontier, with at best rustic and at worst hostile natives.  And also, not a place of palaces and luxury, but by the end of days at Vindolanda, a more hardscrabble place.  As such, the material culture of the buildings we are working was pretty crummy.

Here's the sort of very late pottery we are finding.  Yuck.

 Rome did not "fall" here, so much as stop paying the help.  When your low morale, mostly locally recruited troops don't get paid, they revert to being just a batch of local lads with weapons.  The post Roman era is harder to document, because those guys had very little in the way of goods.  No more pottery being made.  Not much trade with other areas.  And what structures they cobbled together out of existing and repaired older stuff was right on top, and first in line to be....

Clobbered by farmers in the modern era.  See the deep scratches in these stones?  Each one caused by a plow hitting it as some poor guy tried to eke a living out of this thin soiled patch of rocks.  

After of course they nicked a lot of the surviving good stones for their farm buildings.

Well, tomorrow is another day.  When I get a bit closer to the wall shown above its likely there will be a bit more archaeology preserved.  Most of what I worked today was just churned up plow soil with a few random bits of pulverized brick, and pot, as well as tiny fragments of glass from Roman times on up to not long ago.  

Vindolanda 2025 Day Two

Sunshine and warmth.  I find this disorienting.  My first decade of volunteering at Vindolanda I carried the same small vial of sun screen back and forth every year, never using it up.  

A delightful day of work.  But of course, responsibilities first.  Just across the way from our excavation is the spot where a child murder victim was found.  The deed was done in Roman times, and I missed making the grim find by a couple of weeks and by one room over.  Every year I leave a few flowers at the spot.

We are working the later Roman and into the Post Roman era.  A mystery on site is this:

That curved section at the front.  Romans, as befits a civilization who had mastered engineering, liked to build everything with right angles.  The exceptions are few, and which one this is is an enigma.  Having uncovered the big paving blocks that the visitor is standing on I can say that I've been wondering about this anomaly since 2010 or so......

A warm day's work.  My friend Pete has already started snapping odd photos of me.  I shall of course reciprocate/retaliate.  Soon, Pete.  Very soon...

Various bits of "manky" late pottery turning up, otherwise not much.  It was a long day's work.  Then a long walk to the pub where I reside.  Rarely do I need a pint before taking on the stairs, but today was such a day.  Contemplating the interesting patterns of foam on glass in the wilds of Northumbria.........

Vindolanda 2025 - Day One

First day of digging is always preceded by "Jet Lag Drinks Hour".  This is, by admittedly imperfect recollections, the 15th year of this ritual.  One was done virtually during Covid.  A couple have been very informal.  But a nice crew turned out this time.

 Participants from the UK, the US, New Zealand, and the only person I've ever met from Yemen.  The topics involved all manner of things.  Tattoos, what it is like to administer emergency first aid while dressed like a pirate, that sort of thing.  Then the customary toast to Absent Friends and off to bed.

Stunning weather and new areas to open up.  The process of removing the green stuff is called "de-turfing".  If you loudly announce that its time to get the Sod Off you will get some strange looks...

I will be showing fewer pictures of small pretty things this year.  Policy on this has gotten a bit tighter  In fairness they are doing a much better job on the "official" side regards publicizing what is going on.  Oh, and so far I've found only a few small bits of pottery.

So expect more reportage on the odd aspects of life as a volunteer excavator.  Such as, on my morning walk in, these big patches of stuff that look exactly like our rhubarb....but evidently are some sort of nasty super weed that can grow right through asphalt!

Off the Map