Vindolanda 2023 - Day Four

A full day in the earliest layers of the fort.  In places I was cleaning down to the bare earth the Romans built the first fort on circa 85 AD.  Of course into that hard clay they pounded not only the standards of the Legions but a wide assortment of post holes.  My main work of the day involved defining these.  I think I found about a dozen.  Each one got its own little white tag.  Note also several upright posts in the excavated face.

At various points in the day I did have sections of matted anaerobic material to sort through.  Here's a nifty piece of patterned Roman glass that twinkled in the light of day after 1900 years in the dark.

Other odd things popped up.  Bits of hay and a small bit of scrap leather.  But sometimes you run across something that just makes you stop and think.  Like this thing:

Perfectly square piece of dark wood, probably oak.  It is broken off on one side so would have been rectangular.  And it has a bit of shaping around the edges.  It looks like a raised ridge.  Now this should be a wax stylus tablet.  They were filled with bees wax and provided a handy but erasable writing surface.  The wax was incised with a special kind of iron stylus.  Here, have a look at a modern reconstruction:

Alas, what I found was too thick and so was ruled to just be a bit of cut off plank.  And, given my obedient adherence to the site's "don't show the metal artifacts you find" police I certainly would not show you a picture of a nice iron stylus even if I were to have found one about half an hour later.......