A little puzzle to start the day.
Is this: Geology, Archeology or Pudding?
I will give you a clue, it is not an artifact. I would never clobber anything important hard enough to split it in two.
The other two categories are tougher. Pudding you see is a catch all description of pretty much any foodstuff in the UK. Dessert, main dishes, appetizers. The category encompasses almost anything edible and a few things that I would say are not.
So, rock or dessert. I will just say that it is pretty darn heavy but as a clue that is not going to help you much.
Moving more rubble today. I did not personally find anything but next to me came up a nice ring. I don't generally show pictures of metal finds but this has already been on the Vindolanda official twitter feed so the embargo is off.
It is a really big ring, presumably a man's size. In the above photos it is modeled by one of the staff archaeologists. She claims this means she is now "married to the site". 1800 years is a substantial age gap in any relationship but lets hope they make things work out.
Another day of removing "Demolition Rubble", this time just to the north of where I had been the day before. Glorious sunshine, which is good fortune in its own way, but how to improve my luck regards actually finding things amidst the rubble?
Well, I spotted this interesting little rock glittering in the sun.
Of course it is not an artifact, just a rock that has fractured in interesting ways. And, no, I don't actually believe in the magical powers of crystals. But what the heck, I held it up over the trench then set it on a nearby wall.
It took a while, all day in fact, but eventually I did find something.
It is the bottom part of a bowl, and the delightful pumpkin orange color identifies it immediately as Samian Ware.
A quick splash from my water bottle and a wipe with my sleeve (you don't of course do this with fragile artifacts or surface worn pottery)
As soon as it came out of the ground I just knew it would have a pottery stamp on it. You don't find these very often and it is a great help to dating sites as the patterns of what variety of Samian was made where and when are pretty well mapped out.
As I said earlier, I don't really believe in the Powers of Crystals. But to some extent I believe in karma. To share my good fortune I loaned the crystal to an adjacent trench where they set it up like some mystical wifi router distributing luck to its immediate environs.
Chasing features. Well, they are not going anywhere so tracing features would make more sense.
Our "Demolition Rubble" north of our cement floor actually has under it an interesting pebbled, compacted floor. It rather looks water proof which would be in keeping with the theory that this is some sort of bath suite for the commanding officer. Elsewhere there might be a "plunge bath" coming up but it is covered over with a later floor surface which may make the proof impractical. This area of the excavation only has a few more weeks of excavation scheduled.
A few pictures. Feel free to refer back to earlier posts where high hopes for underfloor heating, etc were being entertained.
Here is an end of day over view. Our earlier cement surface on the left. Our work today is the lower, and presumably older, surface to the right.
Here is the transition between the compacted cement stuff in the upper part of the photo and the new pebbled surface below. There is a somewhat arbitrary line of rock left dividing them, our prior expectations of a wall being unrealized.
Worm's eye - oh, they don't have any - view of the pebbled surface. If you squint really hard you can imagine that the pretty stones were placed on purpose. If that is the case then the delightfully warm sunshine has started to effect you.
And as to what it means. Who knows? For certain there were multiple layers of flooring in the same "room", and the room might have expanded and contracted in size over the roughly twenty years of occupation. Or was it occupied earlier? Or later? It sure would help to find a nice coin on the floor but whoever was detailed to tidy it up at the end did a very efficient job.
Sometimes the plastic bag you get at the beginning of the day tells you what to expect:
But this was not as bad as you might expect, clearing rubble does get you to interesting things underneath and there are always a few odds and ends that find their way into areas like this.
So another day of digging in idyllic weather.
Elsewhere on the site some fun bits of the highly decorated Samian ware are popping up. Enjoy a close up of grape vines, leafs and happy looking birds.
By the end of the day we had a few less posh pottery fragments and a curious bit of polished bone.
Close to quitting time I came up with an odd bit of rounded stone. I had it in and out of the discard bucket a couple of times. But something about the color, weight and shape just did not fit the multitude of other stones that went under the trowel.
Finally I brought it to the supervising archeologist - who in general does not like "pot lids" for an official ruling.
Yep, pot lid. A worked bit of pottery or as in this case stone. It is the most humble of artifacts but at least I got to deploy the staff of recognition as my modest contribution to the advancement of ancient times got recorded and bagged.
On the weekend between our digging days we try to organize something diverting to do. Weather and weariness permitting it often includes a walk, ideally to see a few minor sights that are not on the usual tour circuit.
On a warm but grey Sunday it was off and hiking.
First stop was along a section of Hadrian's Wall, where my friend Pete has all manner of inscriptions and such tagged on his phone. So he had no difficulty pointing us right to this:
He seems inordinately pleased with himself.
Next up was a cross country trek that took in the ruins of a minor castle, first recorded as have a "license to crenellate" in 1380. I wonder if you can still apply for one of those somewhere?
Another member of our party, Scott, has a dream of buying a home in this part of the world. This would be something of a "fixer-upper".
Shortly after leaving Tremaine Castle we went through a farm where one of the black and white sheep dogs took a liking to our party. She insisted on following us for the next five miles. We tried at times to leave her behind, reasoning that if we let her through some of the many gates we crossed through it might be hard for her to return home. But the dog, we later learned her name was Tess, would have none of it, simply leaping over every gate and wall along the way.
A trek off the beaten path has to have some excuse for a destination, and in our case it was a little notation on the Ordinance Map. It said "Holy Well, (Sulphurious)". We had heard tell that monks from the nearby Lanercost Priory used to come up once a year to bless the spring. Well, that seems worth a look.
It is a pretty little spot, right along a steam called Kings Water. It does smell quite a bit like sulphur. Note the pewter cup, it is attached to the rock with a little chain. The spring is crystal clear water running down but leaving that bright white mineral residue.
When given a chance to drink from a Holy Well it is probably a good idea to do so. First a little whiff...
Then a healthy swig.
I feel I should give a "wine review" of the stuff.
-Clarity: Superb
-Bouquet: A bit assertive. Definite tones of creosote with a hint of chlorine.
-Taste: It recalls an egg salad sandwich that you ate after it had been in the fridge a day or two too long.
-Aftertaste: A long swig from my water bottle.
But does it make you more Holy? Here Pete is doing his best at being Beatific. Not sure he is managing it well especially as he did not partake from the Well. He claims he had a nip on a previous walk through.....
Saint Peter the Very Lesser.
Frankly the excavating today was not stimulating. When an area is being finished off at the end of a five year "Scheduled Monument" permission there are just a lot of little areas to tidy up and square off.
I shall spare you.
As compensation, lets have a stroll about the site and consider a matter that rarely is addressed in formal archeology discussions. Who is relieving themselves uphill from whom.
I don't for a moment doubt that Emperor Augustus back in Rome had plumbing facilities not too different from our modern amenities. Perhaps he had a slave on duty 24/7 ready to empty an amphora of rose scented waters on demand. But for the average folks things were a bit less savory.
Roman forts are usually laid out with a standard template. Roughly rectangular but with rounded corners. Think of a playing card.
But under the surface there is an entire infrastructure. Foundations, channels for heated air. And drains. Lots and lots of drains. Occasionally water pipes too, wooden being more common than other materials.
What ran in these channels is a fair matter for discussion. Clearly their main function was run off of rain water. But when excavated they are usually full of small bones and other domestic trash. And as to more basic matters, well one way that the recently exposed cavalry barracks were identified as such was by a series of channels running down the center of the rooms. You can order soldiers to use the latrines, or the occasional set-in-the-floor pot that might have been the indoor equivalent, but horses don't obey those sorts of orders. Probably soldiers didn't either.
Lets follow a series of channels from the higher ground of the fort on down.
Above are a couple of smaller stone channels. As is often the case on this site you find little sections intact, in other places parts have been borrowed for later reuse.
Here are a couple of bigger ones. On the right another shallow, but wider channel. The small deeper excavation to the left is a single segment of a buried channel with upright stone sides.
Coming down the slope we have a crazy race track of multiple channels.
Near the bottom they still carry water. This was on a day when it had not rained for a week. I have seen the system full of rushing water on rain soaked days.
The destination of course was a latrine. These were usually at the corners of the forts, at least those used by the common soldiery. A few other locations such as the Commander's house had smaller and more private accommodations. Upstream of course.
The water, and other stuff, constantly running into the troughs of the latrine in theory kept it cleared out. In practice maybe not. Of course with stuff going there had to be an outlet. Above you can see it, a nicely formed arch in the external wall of the fort. And it ends up:
Running to the outside. It would have dumped directly into the fort ditch. While this may have added a little bit of disincentive for raiders or simple thieves to try and sneak into the fort one can only imagine the olfactory experience of living surrounded on all sides by an inefficient sewage treatment plant!
Generally speaking archeology is a mixture of "features" and "small finds". The former are walls, pits, roadways. The latter are the fun stuff, coins, jewelry, bits and bobs.
Of course we should be delighted with "features". But some part of us really wants to find things. It is our nature.
But there are consolations. On my fourth straight day of Features and no Finds it was an enjoyable bit of work. Perfect weather, good company, and a Feature that we actually got to excavate completely. And even - more or less - come to understand.
Now, when I start to speculate on things be aware that mine is an uneducated opinion, colored liberally by ideas with scant substance but which amuse me on some level. So, back to our cement floor.
Here is my best End of Day picture. In the foreground is the nice patch of Opus Sig - to call it in the digging vernacular - that swell white cement that made us think we were in the bathing suite of the commanding officer of the fort. Way at the far end there was another smaller patch, so certainly it was going to be Op Sig all the way...
Nope. Across from left to right and just past the good cement there appears to be the foundation for a wall. Not a round house as previously suspected. Beyond is a floor surface that is mostly not real cement, more of a compacted surface of pebbles with just a smear of white cement in one spot. And to the right of it? The rugged remains of another wall. This probably lines up with the remaining wall seen out beyond our structure.
Below is another view just showing the area we cleared today.
It looks as if there was a larger room with a nice cement floor. At some point later on it was cut up, a wall put across the top edge and the right side of the brown pebbly surface you can see above. There is one solitary patch of decent cement that you can see here. The remainder is crummy stuff, compacted brown dirt, pebbles and in places a sickly yellow degraded cement.
As to when this happened it is hard to be sure. It would have been great to find a coin on this floor to allow us to date it exactly. But there was nothing to be found but the occasional nail and a few bits of bashed up pottery.
And as to why? What would prompt somebody to subdivide a nice room and redo it in shoddy materials? It was not an obviously impoverished era in Roman history...the Antonine Emperors ran things fairly well, thanks.
Maybe the answer is more personal. Every decade or so the fort would get a new commander. We know from extant writing tablets that they would bring their wives along. Maybe the commander, or his fine lady, just had horrible taste!
With this project done it is off to a new assignment tomorrow. Details by and by..
