Vindolanda 2022 Day Seventeen - Photons!

I always check the forecast when I roll out of bed in the morning.  Today it indicated about a 2% chance of rain during excavating hours and a temperature that would approach 70 degrees F.  Unusual for this part of the world in springtime.  So....

Apply sunscreen before departure?  Yes, serves as waterproofing just as well.

Short sleeves?  Yes, but...

Leave rain suit behind?  No, no way.

Sunglasses?  Borderline call.  Nice for the walk into the site which is going into the morning sun, but I've never been able to read soil changes with them on.  So, baseball cap it shall be.

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In follow up to yesterday's post on altars repurposed as building material.  Once you start thinking that way you start to see things.  So I zeroed in on this, another beat up sandstone altar fragment built into a floor surface.

Now this makes the fifth time I've been on site when such a repurposing is present.  I asked how often it has happened over the long years of Vindolanda being excavated.  "Hundreds of times" was the answer.

It was a bright sunny warm day.  As the lower end of the site is still soggy I spent the day continuing yesterday's excavation.  But instead of a nice clean floor it turned into a jumbled up pile of large and small stones.  Purpose?  If indeed it had one it is not obvious.

I think it is a rubbishy post Roman wall going through an earlier floor surface but that's a semi educated guess.

So a day of unexciting archaeology.  No small finds.  Only a few bits of pottery and bone.  At the end of the day...

A pint of bitter and some microwave Tikka Masala.  A nice end to a sub par day of digging.  Which, it must be said, is still much better than most days doing anything else.  Hoping for dry weather tomorrow.