Vindolanda 2012 day nine

After weather forecasts most grim we were surprised to get a full day of digging in, albeit wallowing about in mud the last hour or so. 

Here is a nice shot of the trench that had such water issues yesterday:

It is a convenient place for washing off tools.

Obviously I am onto a new patch, and it interestingly seems to be the place where a number of things of similar color got dumped.  An early form of recycling sorting?  Unlikely.

Here are some roof tiles as they pop up from the ground:

I think they wash up nicely:

Now here is an odd one:

It is actually the bottom part of a Roman wine amphora, something like this:

You do not find these very often, and they are of particular interest for two reasons.  Firstly, if you get lucky and find the right part among the various shards I recovered, they often have a painted on label indicating the wine maker.  And in the modern era you can even test residues of wine in these things and figure out sort of "CSI style" what the origin of the wine was.  Of course, some were reused as in floor latrines which might confuse the analysis. 

After a recent silly post on British ice cream I could not resist a posed shot:

Finally this came up late in the day in a nearby deep trench.  I have a post clean up picture as well-we washed him off in the pool shown above-but I rather like this image of the mud covered skull of a Roman cavalry horse from the late 1st century AD!