Vindolanda 2015 Day Nine The Good Stuff

Even when you are digging down in the anaerobic layers, hunting for small delicate things, you still encounter the occasional big whopping artifact......here is a huge chunk of amphora complete with the stub of the handle.

But most of the time you are standing over a wheelbarrow, crumbling big lunks of mud, dirt and other "stuff".  It is full of twigs, sticks, horse manure, etc.  It looks like this:

I was a little "chuffed" early on when I found these scraps of leather.  This is something I had not encountered in the past.

But then one of my digging mates, Mark, over in the other trench, started hauling up huge chunks of leather from what appear to be panels of a tent later used to cover a floor.  This is only a small part of it:

Well, OK.  I had dug right next to him last week and was feeling badly that I had found more artifacts than he had.  But as I patiently crushed up lumps of cold, icky stuff I looked into my barrow and found something rather marvelous.....

Behold, the first writing tablet of the 2015 season!  Perhaps my minimal contribution to the advance of archeological knowlege.  Who knows what it might say when it is done with conservation?  I have looked long and hard for one of these and it was exciting to find a specimen, albeit only a partial one.