England 2026 - Plague Village

When I excavate at Vindolanda there is that pesky in between weekend where they require us to put down the tools and rest.  It is usually the occasion for our little band to do some sort of interesting road trips.  This year the Saturday road trip started here:

Welcome to Throckrington.  The ancient church and an adjacent farm is everything that is above ground.  It is a plague village, a community of the dead.

Evidently it used to be a thriving place.  But in 1847 a sailor returned home....with cholera.  There were so many deaths that the village was abandoned, its structures burned to the ground.  Today it is a wind swept, lonely place.

Some of the tombstones make me think it may have been a bit peculiar even back in the day.

And....

If you squint through the lichens it says:

In Memory of ISABLE Wife of 

JACOB COOK, who died

May the 11th 1814 aged 75 years

Also JACOB COOK who died on 

the 9th of March 1817, in the 78 year of his age

For more than fifty years he was

deeply acquainted with experimental

relegion.  He lived a holy and an use

ful life, and died a happy and triumph

ant Death.  

(It does go on to list various other members of the Cook family, squeezing some grand kids in right down at the hard to read bottom edge).

Another notable burial in the place is Lord Beveridge.  At first glance I thought it was Lord Beverage, which would be interesting. I might have been thinking of a later stop on our itinerary.

Lord Beveridge of Tuggal is a pretty recent addition to the graveyard.  He is said to be one of the architects of the modern British welfare state.  I'd say he was lucky to have gotten into hallowed ground, as he described himself as a "materialistic agnostic", and dabbled in Eugenics.  He also - along with Albert Einstein - was part of a People's World Convention that post war was proposing to draft a Constitution for the Federation of Earth.  Rather Trekky.....

It was a busy Saturday, and I'll have to save the strange antiques market and Mad Sufferegette for another day.  But we ended it in style, with a visit to the brewery and tap room of the First and Last Brewery.  They make the Best Bitter that I enjoyed frequently at The Bowes.  Mmmmm for now all I can do is remember a pint of Reiver after a dusty day of digging.....

Vindolanda 2026 - Day Ten and Last

Sun and good spirits across the site on the last day of the session.  Report on Day 10 and on various ancillary matters will have to wait a few days. 

Shower-Curry-Pints-Sleep-Auto-Plane-Plane-Shuttle-Car that hopefully starts-Bed......

Oh, and I'll try to explain this guy.

 

Vindolanda 2026 - Day Nine

Rain shortened day.  This will happen in England.  Annoyingly after the day was "called" the skies cleared and it was rather nice.  Sigh.

I started the day back in the Centurion's apartment.  It had been a tedious bit of floor cleaning the day before so I was angling for a reassignment but was sent back for more exposing and polishing of cobbles.  Fair enough, I am actually quite good at this.

My karmic reward was a coin.  Now, I am not allowed to show any metal finds of consequence.  And so I shan't.  But I don't see that there is any prohibition against noting that the Romans often put on the reverse of their coins an image of a goddess holding a staff.  Sort of like this example which was NOT found on site!

Interestingly the recording of small finds is done differently this year.  In times past the finder of something fun would be given a special marked pole and one of the archaeology team would record the find with something like a surveyors device called a Total Station.   It was fun, you held that staff up in victory even though it was not your picture being taken.  Nowadays there is a GPS based device and it is generally held by one of the assistants.  I think the similarity to the above coin image is rather interesting....

Last day tomorrow.   Sigh.

Vindolanda 2026 - Day Eight

The days are winding down....

Current place I'm excavating is the apartment of the centurion.  His room was always the largest and always at the end of the barracks block.  Here's an overview.  I know, making surfaces look interesting in a photo is a challenge.

The very observant among you might note that the floor is not buckled and bowed like the other barracks rooms.  In addition to quite probably better maintenance, it seems likely that the earlier wall that "broke the back" of the other rooms is not present at this end of the building.

Various small things turned up.  Not all that exciting.

Lumpy iron thing.  Probably a nail, but outside chance of it being a low grade "bow brooch".  It goes in the general finds bag with the pottery, glass, bones, and, yes, nails.  Let post ex figure it out.

This one I had figured out right away.

It is an iron ring...with a rust stained stone stuck in the middle.  Use? Ah, who knows.

And lacking knowledge I can have a little fun with speculation.

One of the ladies digging the same trench is from New Zealand.  In the course of chatting I learned that she had a side gig as an extra in movies filmed over there.  Of which there are many.

In one production she wore pointy ears and was part of a fantasy genre.  She had signed an NDA and so could not tell me which one. * But it got me to thinking......

Hmm, hobbit sized person.  Comes from as close to Middle Earth as you can get on this planet.  And I find a mysterious Ring.  Knowing that The One Ring can change sizes based on its wearer it is probably for the best that there was a stone wedged in there.  Otherwise I supposed I would by now be turning dark and hissing about "MY PRECIOUSSS...."

--------------------------------

* she showed me a photo of herself in full makeup and costume.  At which point I asked if I would have to watch the execrable Rings of Power series on Amazon to see her.  Thankfully, no.

Vindolanda 2026 - Day Seven

Wally World.

 Spent a good part of the day chasing a wall.  

The barracks room we were in was constructed circa 213 AD.  On top of a different barracks from 50 years earlier.  Presumably nobody on the later construction crew had any idea what was underneath, so things were plotted out nice and neat....and then started sinking into earlier ditches, pits and assorted features.  Here's an example of what can happen:

Yes, this is a wall.  Or rather the top of one.

It dates to the Antonine stone fort, so lets say 140's or 150's.  It looks like junk at this level but I'm told is actually pretty nice down another foot or so.

What we had to work with was without question an annoying bump in the floor to the guys who lived in this barracks room in later years.  And I mean lots of later years.  After the 213 build was completed the space was occupied through the end of the Roman era in the early 400's, and to some extent on into the Dark Ages.  So, a couple hundred years of slumping floors, patching and replacing floor levels.  And through it all the big ridge right down the center of the room was just....there...

You can actually see evidence of this buried wall all up and down the length of the barracks block....

As viewed from the next barracks room over, you can see where the later wall has had its back "broken" where subsidence has happened on either side of the presumably solid wall beneath.

That's a bit more "feature" talk than many will find of interest.  So here's a sight from my morning walk up to the site.  It's about forty minutes of up and down hills.  At one point I go past a riding stable.  I'm becoming friends with the horses who continue to expect me to produce an apple or carrot out of my pocket some day.  I like the zebra style horse coat....

The Romans actually knew about zebras.  They called them Hippotigris, which means horse-tiger. Once in a while a live specimen would be brought back from the coast of East Africa.  They were rare novelties that were occasionally seen pulling chariots in the circus or being dispatched in the Colosseum.  

Vindolanda 2026 - Day Six

Guess I didn't take any pictures today.

Nice weather, steady progress.  But I didn't find anything novel.  Just another spear point and I showed you one of those last time.  Mostly we were chasing walls and trying to find the perimeters of an oven.  Not glamorous stuff.

So instead, a few pictures from my in between weekend.

We did a number of things, some I'll report on presently.  Among them was a visit to "Northumberlandia", purportedly the world's largest human figure sculpture.

112 feet tall.  1300 feet long.  Yep, she's a big gal.

It's quite a climb up to her, er, features.

The view from nose level......

Evidently some bits are more popular with visitors than others, and people don't always stay on the appropriate paths.  Hey, treat the Lady right...

Vindolanda 2026 - Day Five

Finds and Features.

Everyone at the fence and "out in the world" is always interested in whether I've found some clever artifact.  OK, fine, that's part of what we do.  I'll get to that in a bit.  But almost nobody asks about interesting "features".  So bear with me, I'll try to show you something.

The barracks room I have been working in was occupied for about 200 years.  That is a ridiculous span of  time.  Over it there were certainly renovations, mishaps, additions and removals.  Doorways come and go.  Hearths appear.  When floors get uneven piles of debris are added and a new floor level is added.  In post Roman times there were Dark Age types building ramshackle structures on top, then later still farmers trying to plow the land for a meager living.

These photos show something unusual...

Here is a nice East - West wall inside an infantry barracks room.  It has the usual configuration, decent stones lined up on the inner and outer faces with a bit of rubble core in the center.  It's in decent shape for having been presumably laid down in 213 AD and then repaired and kept in service for about 200 years.  It sits roughly on an earlier wall from perhaps 50 years previous.

But if you look in the middle portion of the photo you'll see a red and black trowel handle sticking up.  This is sunk into a small more or less round hole in the wall.

Let's take a closer look, shall we?

And a look at the wall front below this....

This appears to be a "post hole", a little socket into which a wooden post would have been inserted.  The packed stones around the hole held the post in place.  So, what was it?  When you see a line of these in soil you know you have a wooden building.  But built into a wall is weird.  Did it support a canopy?  Had the back of the barracks collapsed at some point?  I've seen a lot of walls but this looks like a first.

Oh, OK, you want a "find"?  In keeping with my policy of not showing things that might attract "night hawks" looking for a quick nocturnal pay day let me say that this artifact was falling apart when I found it and has zero market value.  

Photo One.  Something vaguely pointed and made of disintegrating iron.  Note the weird folded appearance of the central metal bits....

Photo Two.  A bigger chunk.  Man, that central area looks odd.  Almost organic although it is of course highly degraded metal.

Last photo, three bits assembled.

Obvious now.  I must say, while I've found a few of these before this is the first example that, by way of its deteriorating state, showed me a bit about how Romans worked metal.  When making something substantial such as a knife, spear or sword, you started out with thin sheets of iron and combined them by a process of heating, folding and hammering at the forge.  It seems plausible that this level of technology would have been available "on site" where it is known that metal smelting and working was carried on.