Buried Treasure 11

Hello, let me take you to the British Museum to room 49. These are the Vindolanda tablets on display. They contain messages written in ink on thin sheets of wood to and from members of the garrison of the Roman fort of Vindolanda, just south of Hadrian's Wall. The wall was built in the 120s. Vindolanda Fort was built over 30 years before that, and most of these tablets relate to that very early period. They're the size of a modern postcard. Some of them are official, they deal with military matters, but others are personal. Vindolanda, the name, means white fields, and we know that the Romans called it Vindolanda, an altar with that name on, dedicated to Vulcan, was discovered on the site nearly a hundred years ago. But the tablets confirm Vindolanda as the Roman name. The first tablets were found in the 1970s, and once excavated and exposed to the air, they very quickly turned black and unreadable. But advanced infrared photography has enabled them to be read and to be transcribed, and what they tell us about is everyday life on this northern frontier in early Roman Britain. One of the highlights is tablet number 291. It's an invitation to a birthday party on the 11th of September, and it's from Claudia Severa from a nearby fort to her sister Lepidina in Vindolanda. It's quite possibly the oldest surviving document written in Latin by a woman. Some of the others are really interesting. I'll give you one or two examples. This is tablet 346, obviously came with a parcel. I have sent you socks, two pairs of sandals, and duo a subligariorum. Duo a subligariorum. Duo two. Two pairs of subligoria. They're underpants. Who knew the Roman army wore underpants? One tablet refers to the locals. It's a very rare reference to the British, and it refers to them very disparagingly as Britonculi, little Britons. There is a message from Musculus. He's a Roman cavalry officer, a decorian. He's in charge of a squadron of the ninth cohort of Batavians. He is writing to one of his commanders, the prefect of the ninth cohort, a man called Flavius Carialis. Flavius Carialis is connected with about 80 of the tablets that have been found at Vindolanda. This is what he wrote. He wants clarification of his orders. Please, my lord, give instructions on what you want us to do tomorrow. Are we all to return with the standard, or just half of us? Then he adds, my fellow soldiers have no beer. Please order some to be sent. Now, you associate wine with Romans, but this is northern Britain, so perhaps they're doing in Britain what the British do. But the Batavians are recruited from a Germanic tribe, so that may explain the preference for beer. But it just brings you so close to these people, because you can imagine him writing for clarification of his orders, and one of his men giving him a nudge and saying, have you told him we're out of beer? The tablets also tell us that there was a high degree of literacy in the Roman army. Now, since Vindolanda, we've had the discovery of the Bloomberg tablets. Now, these were excavated between 2010 and 2013, and it was on the site of what is now the Bloomberg building, which replaced Bucklersbury House, and they predate the tablets from Vindolanda. They date from around about 50 AD to 80 AD, the earliest written documents yet found in Britain. They're not so personal, they're about legal and financial matters, but interesting that they tell us about the administration of London in this very early Roman period. Now, these weren't written in ink. These are still wooden tablets, but they'd been covered with a thin layer of wax, and the wax had been written through with a stylus. Now, because it was wax, then they could be reusable, seal the wax or re-wax them. But where they'd been scratched through with a stylus, it had left faint marks on the wood. And the wet environment, they were buried where the river Walbrook runs underground, the wet environment had preserved them. And it was digital technology that enabled them to be read. One of them is quite interesting because it contained an alphabet, somebody had written out the alphabet. So an educational tool, and it's evidence that perhaps there was an early school in London of this period. Now, the building boom in London that began in the 1980s has turned up hundreds of artefacts. And under the planning regulations, anyone who is planning to construct new foundations in London has to pay for any resultant archaeology. And the Museum of London employs over 100 full time archaeologists. And they're kept very busy. And when you remember that the City of London has been there for over 2000 years, and the amount of people who have lived there, population squashed together within that city portion of the square mile, it is perhaps unsurprising to think that when you walk those streets, beneath your feet, there is over six metres of deposits, that's extremely rich. Now, most of what the Museum of London archaeologists get engaged with is rescue work. And it's always competing priorities. Contractors are trying to bring their projects in on time and to budget, the archaeologists want to explore and gather every bit of information they can from the archaeology, but they seem to work together. And one of the most extensive archaeological programs ever undertaken in the UK accompanied the construction of Crossrail. And I'm going to return to that in the next session. 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