Vindolanda 2022 Day Sixteen - Crumbling Piety

Last week we had no time lost to weather.  Today that caught up with us.  Rained off in the morning we had a couple of interesting lectures.  We then got out for a while in the early afternoon but the lower end of the site where we'd been working was very wet so several of us were moved up to a floor surface.  Fairly interesting as these were pretty trashy people.  Much pottery and part of a metal lock came up before the rain resumed.  Here's the top of a perfume container.

On wet days you at least have plenty of puddles in which to give things a quick wash before a photo.

In lieu of more current things I'll show a little something from three weeks ago.

We'd been digging along happily when we noticed that the top of a stone built into a jumbled up wall had curious linear grooves in it.  You'll often see these near the surface where they are plow marks, but this was too deep down and the marks stopped short of the edges.  The lead archaeologist said we probably had an altar.

Altars are actually not all that uncommon on the site.  In addition to the big ones found in temples and official buildings there were smaller personal altars.  Most were about the shape of a shoebox just a bit bigger.  Here's an example from the site's museum which shows similar decorative grooves on its lower edge.

And another example from the site.  This is a bigger, more on the size we were looking at, and is actually a reproduction.  The original is of course in the museum.

We had high hopes, but when the protruding stone was excavated a bit more it proved to be just a broken off stub.

Cheap, crumbly sandstone.  No visible markings.  A few other random fragments are still embedded in the wall.

We can relate to many things from the Roman era.  Or sometimes just be close enough in our attitudes to see things in relief.  

The Roman Empire had a vigorous pantheism.  Every new regiment coming into the fort from another region brought along their own beliefs and carved their own little altars.  Usually they have a dip in the top called a "focus".  That's where you'd pour a libation in offering to your god.  Overarching it all of course was an official Imperial cult where you had to give nominal allegiance to the Emperor as divine, or at least an authority so high, so powerful, so literally august that disobedience would be unthinkable.

In some ways it was an easy going system.  It seems nobody was particularly bothered about using left over altars from other faiths as building blocks.  In our time we tend to be more generically respectful.  Even my agnostic friends take their hats off when they enter a church or mosque.

History of course is the study of change.  The old system was imperfect.  As was what replaced it.  Any pagan religious brick a brac that endured to the late Empire's conversion to Christianity was bashed to bits by iconoclasts of the new Faith.  And the over arching cult morphed from an all powerful, darn near divine Emperor into a Papacy that preserved the language and much of the panoply of the Imperial court in a vigorous monotheistic system.

Change.  Seldom all bad, seldom all good, always continuing to evolve.