Vindolanda Day Seven

Basically a day spent clearing the way for the dive into the deep fort ditch.  I was given a helper or two, pointed to a patch of packed clay and rubble and told "make it go away".  Purposeful labor under a hot sun.

But even in barren layers a few things always turn up.

Here's a broken spindle whorl.  This does not look like much but was an interesting little domestic artifact.  It was, as I understand it, used to help twist wool into thread by making it easier to spin rapidly about.  The central hole here looks small and only partly formed.  These were usually, in a frontier site, made from old bits of broken pottery and I rather suspect that this one broke in the process of boring the hole.

Here is what a better specimen, also made from an old pottery fragment, should look like:

On a nearby part of the site there is also a stepwise approach to the deep ditch.  Here they have found some more interesting stuff.  Today they really thought they had an altar on their hands.  But it was not....although it was something very interesting.

Here's a happy crew of diggers posed around the Roman stone bench support they dug up!  None of us had ever seen one before.  It has a level of swank that suggests it came from someplace nice before it was tossed out as upper ditch fill.

There was a film crew on site today from Smithsonian televison.  I suppose I might end up as background footage to whatever they end up doing, but they did not to my knowledge directly interview any of the diggers on hand today.

Black anaerobic layers one inch from where we stopped work today.  Although there are never any guarantees, things might start getting interesting tomorrow.