Vindolanda digging report day five. Mystery solved a different way.

This has been a week in pursuit of archeological features.  Nifty finds have been of secondary importance but Nigel and I have still turned up an assortment of broken pottery, some shards of roof and drain tile and another coin.  Myself, it has been pursuit of the missing wall, presumably part of the centurion's quarters.

As it turns out, it actually was there all along, just a little deeper.  Here is a picture of the final clean up, with the elusive wall extending from the earlier segment (dry and on the right) to the new discoveries.

It is frankly not that great a wall, poorly constructed around AD 214, but in some small measure my painstaking work here will advance archeological knowlege of this era.  Of course in a few weeks some other digger will be assigned to demolish it to get at what lies below.

Elsewhere on the site other "bits and bobs" have turned up.  Another brooch, the metal fittings for a spear handle, a couple of knife blades.

But overall the end of the week paired with more fine weather induces a sort of euphoria.  The diggers get a little silly.

One team discovered a huge, ill shaped boulder plopped down in their area of road/roadside ditch.  For some unfathomable reason this massive thing was quarried elsewhere, hauled with some effort into the fort---and dropped in a location guaranteed to be a persisting pain in the posterior.  This hideous rock has been dubbed "the monster", and the picture below shows a digger vamping a bit like a Siren luring sailors to their doom....

But for real nonsense I did not have to look farther than the other side of my roman roadway.  "Pete" unearthed a bit of rock that he first decided was a depiction of the continent of Africa (never you mind that the romans had no idea what the southern two thirds of Africa looked like).

But after a minute of reflection he concluded that in fact this was a different sort of artifact. 

Hey, admit it, you and I have both seen less attactive fashions paraded down the runways of Paris and Milan!

A two day break from archeology, various other nonsense will turn up in the interval.

Cheers from the Twice Brewed Inn.

Digging Vindolanda Day Four--Mystery solved

Various things coming up around the site today.  My digging mate Nigel came up with a broken coin that had enough inscription remaining to be helpful dating our confusing welter of walls, present and absent.

Here's a nice bit of jewelry from the other side of my road:

I think I mentioned yesterday that another team had encountered a large batch of broken storage jars (amphorae if you are curious).  Here's what happens when you are careless with several large pottery containers:

Somebody did not clean up after themselves!

As for me, not much to report.  I am still in pursuit of the missing wall.  I continue to advance my trench through largely barren clay, just a few pottery bits here and there.

But I have figured out where the missing wall stones are:

A snug little cottage just up the road from the excavations.  Hey, nice stones mister, don't suppose you want to tell us where your great grandfather got em......

Vindolanda digging report day three. Dude, where's my wall?

Ridiculous, intoxicatingly nice weather today.  My apologies in particular to those of you back home in Wisconsin where anything that is growing is probably some form of cold tolerant fungus, but here in Northumbria it is green and glorious.  In fact, the only way that digging conditions could have been improved upon today would have been the unexpected arrival of winged dryads in diaphenous togas offering us cool pints of ale on silver trays. 

That in part makes up for a day of very limited discoveries.  Elsewhere on the site a few beads turned up, and quite a cargo of broken storage jars that may have been used for fill.  But other than that...not much. 

My digging partner and I were assigned to follow a wall.  The only problem was, it was gone.   Here is what we were supposed to follow:

The sunglasses, trowel and kneeling pad are at the end of the previously excavated wall segment, which is supposed to be roughly three tiers of stone thick.  Beyond the marked point it is simply----gone.

The problem of course was stone robbers.  Back in the 1700s and 1800s farmers who needed some nifty building stone would just drive their carts up to the old roman fort site and start digging out whatever sized stones they needed.  Heck, it was free and much easier than cutting your own building stones.

To make matters worse I think they left the trench open long enough to fill in with clean silt, so my only finds of the day were a few pottery shards.  Oh, and some nails.  When you get mildly excited by this kind of find it has been an unproductive day.  But as I mentioned, still a very pleasant one.

Vindolanda Digging Report Day two. And the Worst Pub Quiz in Great Britain

Bright sunny day again, fine weather for picking through more rocks.  One of the first ones I lifted up and turned over had this on the bottom side!

Yes, it is just what it appears to be, a Roman spear head.  Or rather, the iron shadow of one.  The actual spearhead was rather corroded and could not be salvaged.  This often happens in the upper layers.

Not long after I came up with a round stone disc.  It had obviously been worked into a nice shape, and may have had some faint graffiti on it.  (No rubbing the artifacts, sometimes you obliterate fine details).

Opinions vary as to whether this sort of object was a stone lid to some sort of container, or a rather large gaming counter.  This was a substantial specimen, so if this was an ancient poker chip I imagine was redeemable for two sheep and an evening with the slave girl of your choice.

Late in the day I came up with a small coin.  These are less exciting than you would think.  Fourth century coins were smaller than a penny, artistically mediocre, and of such low value that you needed a handful to buy a loaf of bread.

Since the dig report is a bit light I offer up the following as a travelogue add on.

It’s official you know.  In some sort of nationwide contest the Twice Brewed Inn was given the dubious honor of having the worst Pub Quiz in Great Britain.  It’s hard to say how they would rank on a world wide census but I am certain that they would be competitive.

I should mention that while I have some categorical deficiencies I am overall a dab hand at trivia.  On the flight over there was an opportunity to play against other passengers.  I logged on, played one round in which I outscored the next closest opponent by a 2:1 ratio.  After that the entire competitive field retired.

So I know a few things about a few things.

Brian, the genial publican of the Twice Brewed, freely admits that the Quiz is “not for purists”.  He claims it is primarily for the amusement of the Inn staff.  A secondary function seems to be systematically humbling the “mavens” from the Vindolanda team.

Penalty points are handed out with abandon, especially when any ruling of the quizmaster is questioned or even simply howled at.  On the other hand the official ban on cheating via smart phone devices is very loosely enforced.

It is very heavily oriented to music, not my strong suit at all.  And the songs, to which you are supposed to supply title and artist, are run together in an eclectic mash up without any indication of what number song it is on the answer sheet. 

Of course, sometimes clues are provided. There were five bonus points if you could identify what “recent movie” a certain song had appeared in.  “Recent” in this case was 11 years ago!

Another song was described as being “a very big hit last year”.  Nobody had ever heard of it so I risked a potential penalty point by asking: “where?”.  The answer---“Manchester”.  Presumably nowhere else.

After a while you become a bit paranoid, suspecting trickery at every turn.  One one song I was able to dredge up the title from some fossilized grey matter dealing with the early 1970s.  Certainly it was “Annie’s Song”, but darn it all, that did not sound like John Denver.  It sounded like someone with measurable testosterone levels.  (Turns out it was indeed Mr. Denver, presumably recording on a day when he had a moderate sinus infection).

But the overall tone of the quiz was actually set by the very first question. 

“What is the name of a young goat?”

The answer, and nothing else got the point, was arbitrarily ruled to be “Billy the Kidd”.

Despite all obstacles the Vindolanda team did prevail this night, after a fashion.  For no particular reason the second prize is a bottle of wine, an item that one might actually find useful under the appropriate circumstances.

First prize was a DVD of the royal wedding.   No, not the recent one, the previous Charles and Dianna event. 

I guess that also is regarded as a “recent movie”.

Rock of Ages-Vindolanda digging day one

First day of digging. 

You never quite know where you will be assigned to work.  Sometimes it is an area full of promise, sometimes not so much.  Of course the counterpoint is that on occasion the most interesting findings come from places that had no darned business being interesting-that is simply the nature of archeological investigation.

For the first day I was teamed up with a talkative and very learned fellow named Nigel.  We were assigned an area that looked like an unpromising patch of rocks formed from tumble down walls.

After moving many wheelbarrows of rocks a few features started to pop through.  Alas, although this area held a floor surface it was the floor of a post roman dwelling.  Post roman basically means dirt poor.  They had forgotten the concepts of coinage, pottery making, and pretty much everything else.  They still remembered how to make jewelry and weapons.  Indeed, our one “small find” of the day was the pin from a brooch.  Other than that it was bits of old weathered pottery and rocks.  And more rocks.

After a while you make a study of rocks, out of necessity.

The rule is that you always swipe the surface of rocks before sending them to the spoils heap.  After all, a couple of years ago this turned up;

  

But today nothing of the sort. 

I did find a few interesting rocks laying about the site.

Here is one close to the surface.   Each line is a plow mark, where some medieval farmer clobbered it hard enough to chip stone.  No doubt each mark was accompanied by a vivid Old English curse.

 Here is a rock with a mark from the quarry.  Batch 14 presumably.

Here is a rock used as a mold for making window frames by pouring in lead.  Roman forts were in large measure self sufficient and practiced quite a bit of low level manufacturing.

Another brilliant day of weather predicted for tomorrow, we anticipate finishing the floor of the dirt poor Dark Agers and dropping down another 4 inches to the late Roman roadway.  These are sometimes swept barren but on a similar road a few yards away I did find a goodly number of small coins a couple seasons back.

Ensconsed at the Twice Brewed Inn

The weather in northern England is ridiculously, intoxicatingly good.  Sunny with brisk warm winds, the curlews making a ruckus and the lambs skipping about the fields.

I made the long journey without incident.  Maybe air travel has imperceptibly relaxed a little with the long awaited news of bin Laden’s demise.

No real digging news yet, I am perched in my room at the Twice Brewed Inn, the sun has been up since about 4:30 but no breakfast until 8, then first day of work at 9:30.

I did walk over yesterday, it was just too nice to not do so.

Current excavations are really starting to show the centuries of occupation of the place.

In archeology you always start on the top.

The Dark Age inhabitants circa 500 AD probably had a vague notion that the crumbling buildings they squatted in were once barracks, back when their grandfathers were nominally Roman soldiers.

But I wonder if they had any idea that under their feet were successive layers of previous barracks going back at least three centuries.  And below that?

I will try and post pictures tomorrow, but sometime in the Second Century a bad design decision was made. And from that day forward successive tiers of nicely planned buildings and roads started sinking and buckling inward.  Heck, they are still doing so.  Patching, filling in low spots, building special drains, nothing ever fixed it.

And soon we will get a look at what caused all the troubles….

Enough about old stones for one day.  Great to be here with many of the old crew on hand or arriving shortly.  Pints have been quaffed, politics discussed, hands shaken. 

Quiz night tonight at the Twice Brewed Inn.  It has been voted the worst pub quiz in the UK, and deservedly so, but is still great fun in a chaotic, arbitrary way.

Cheers!

Gone Digging

As you might guess from the post title I am off for Vindolanda, to dig literally in the detritus of empire.  I have set the autotimer for this posting to 3:10 pm, when I should be wheels up and in the air headed east.

I will try for daily posts for the next two weeks, but travel, dodgy internet connections and so forth might be hinderances. 

I am going to find out what was six inches deeper when we took this picture in 2010!