A Tour of the Excavations at Vindolanda

Welcome to the Vindolanda Excavations. My name is Dr. Andrew Burley. I'm the Director of Excavations from the Vindolanda Trust. Vindolanda is a small frontier fort at the edge of the Roman Empire, but it's one that has an incredibly rich and vibrant history. Mainly because, actually, I say this, one fort. There are many forts here built one on top of the other, creating meters of archaeology underneath your feet when you walk around the site. Those meters of archaeology create incredible preservation layers, anaerobic deposits, oxygen-free layers, where things that would normally rot away at the top of sites, which is what you normally get on an excavation, in oxidized levels, disappear completely at those levels. They're still preserved in the ground here in moist soil at Vindolanda. So what we're looking at in the trenches around about us are a whole series of timber buildings, one stacked on top of another, the remains of early timber forts from the beginning of the conquest of Roman Britain, stretching all the way through to the Hadrianic period. And then once you get beyond the Hadrianic period, they start building in stone on this particular site, which is fantastic. Now there's a range of artifacts we get from here that really put the flesh on the bones of Roman history. So what we're talking about, we're talking about boots and shoes. Over five and a half thousand leather artifacts have come from this site. Absolutely incredible. And each one of those shoes is a direct connection to the person who wore it. And it's transformed our knowledge of history of the Roman army. So as an example of this, when we look at barracks and buildings around like this, we tend to think of Roman soldiers, big hairy Roman soldiers, men mainly. But when we look at the shoes, we find over 50% of the people who lived in some of these buildings were women and children, adolescents, non-adult males. And that's transformed our understanding and appreciation of society here on frontier bases like this over 2000 years ago. The most precious thing we get from the levels down here in the thick mud preserved, encased and buried in those deposits are the Roman letters, the writing tablets, thin pieces of wood about the size of a postcard covered, if we're lucky, in a cursive ink script written with an ink pen. Now they're about the size of postcards, they're about the consistency of damp blotting paper, something like 80 to 120 millimetres thick. Really, sorry, not millimetres thick, sorry, grams. They're very, very thin paper. And it's incredible that they survive in these deposits, but even more incredible when you open up and you read some of those letters, because they're first-hand accounts. They really tell you what's going on. They give you the sort of information you can't possibly get from any other source on an excavation. So what am I talking about here? I'm talking about packages sent from home. I'm talking about disputes between Roman soldiers and farewells and greetings and business deals. I'm talking about the vet who's lent his castration shears to a friend who hasn't returned them. I'm talking about the balneator, the guy in charge of the bathhouse, who hasn't paid his clubhouse fees and he's going to be ejected from the clubhouse. And a very, very angry commanding officer who hasn't got the right stuff because his slaves forgot to send it. So all of those characters start to come alive through their writings and their letters and their artefacts and the preservation of the site. Now, the challenge we face getting down to those levels is really quite complex. We can't remove the buildings on the very, very top of the site because they're also part of the history of England and the World Heritage Site. They're part of the Roman and post-Roman history of the place. So we have to work within their walls and in the spaces outside the buildings to drop the trenches down, have increasingly small windows into the past as we go lower and lower and lower. And then we meet the water table coming up to rise to meet us on the other side. That's a real challenge. But the biggest challenge we face today at sites like Pemberlanda with the anaerobic deposits is climate change. Unfortunately, a lot of the fences that you see here today before you are quite low. They're not very high at all. 20, 30 years ago, we might expect to find these deposits at twice the thickness that you see them today. And as the site starts to dry out, you get terrific heat waves coming through and then torrential rain that follows it. It's introducing new oxygen, new bacteria, new chemistry into the ground and slowly rotting away the deposits before we can get to them. So we're on a bit of a mission at Vindolando, the Vindolando Trust, to try and rescue as much information as we possibly can before climate change beats us to it. So what we're looking at down here is a typical wattle and daub fence that's collapsed, been pushed over by the Roman army. You can still see the beautiful weave of the wattle as it's running through the uprights and has been forced down. And you can also see the colour of the water working the way between the various little sticks. This has been knocked down by the Roman army. It's demolition on the way out. And when the soldiers finish their tours of duty, they purposely bulldoze Vindolando. They pull it apart, they knock it down to make sure there's nothing here that the nasty little Britons can get their hands on until the next Roman garrison come in. And their first job? Rebuild it, build it again. And it happens at this site nine times. Nine forts, completely rebuilt, slapped onto the demolished remains of the earlier bases. It sounds crazy to us, but one of the reasons they do this, complete demolition, rebuild, is also that the Roman army can train as a unit how to build their forts. What better way to train than actually have to do it? So we're looking at Roman handiwork and preserved under this fence and under this mud are three or four more buildings. We've got a long way to go here before we get to the bottom of Vindolando. Now on the other side we've got a bit of a street which has been cut through and then we get one of the large cavalry barracks at the site. So where the team are working here we've got a whole series of cuts through the natural boulder clay and in those cuts they put uprights which mark the partition walls inside the buildings. We've got a little pit coming down here for the water and on the other side of the structures you can see layers of stone inside the walls of the rooms and they're capping more pits. Those pits are urine pits for horses. So these are the stables on this particular side and on the other side of the dividing wall where my team are working over there we start to pick up the living accommodation for the soldiers and their families. Now it looks like a forest of little uprights, little bits of timber here because what we're actually looking at are two or three buildings superimposed one across the other. So the rooms aren't quite as small as you imagine when you look at this. They're about twice the size and some of the posts go from one building and some of the posts go from another. So it's quite complex but that's the nature of Indolanda. Multiple layers of archaeology, sometimes very distinct and apart, sometimes squeezed all together. Our job, which is quite fun, is to untangle all of that. So we're in the southwest quadrant of the last stone fort of Indolanda and around us you can see the remains of the end of Roman Britain. The really rubbly foundations of big 4th century cavalry barracks. Above those we had 5th and 6th century houses built by British people and a little church at the top of the street. Below those structures you can see two very large plinth foundations in the middle of the cobbled road there. And there at the front of what we believe was an old temple which went underneath the cavalry barracks on the right hand side. So two very different types of buildings, two very different styles of structure, two different centuries of occupation of Indolanda. And the deeper you go the more you unwind going past through the street. And underneath our lovely cobbled street you start to get into the black organic preservation layers of the timber forts. Now there are six of those on top of each other before you find the natural boulder clay, the farmer's field that was here when the Roman army first turned up. And the objective of the excavations here is to try and establish where that natural field is across as much of the site as humanly possible and unravel the different periods of occupation and learn about the sometimes completely unique and separate units of people who call this place their home. There wasn't one single Vindolanda, there are many Vindolandas and very many different communities who call this place their home. And our mission is to tease out as much information about all of those different groups, what they had in common, what they didn't have in common, and how they call this place their home. Sometimes four years, sometimes 40 years of their life transforming this landscape and giving us this legacy that we see today. So when you come to Vindolanda you come and make a visit, you see live archaeology going on for six months of the year, you see this place being slowly transformed. You can interact with the excavators, the volunteers, and the archaeologists and learn from them directly about the processes, the practices, and how this place has transformed our knowledge of Roman Britain and history of the Roman army in the Roman Empire. And that sort of interaction, that sort of constant change brings this site alive and that's one of the best things about coming to visit. By coming to visit you support the work but also you get a sense of a place that's dynamic and constantly changing and that's as this place always was through its entire history of use in this landscape. So it's nice to be able to make those connections and that's one of the things which makes people fall in love with Vindolanda because every time they come they see something new and something new has come out of the ground, there's new interpretation and a little bit more of a puzzle has started to lock into place. And that's what we need to do, we need to keep pushing on, pushing forward, until eventually you can say we've learned as much as we possibly can about this site. This is only one of 14 forts on Hadrian's Wall and so there are over a thousand years of archaeology to go at this pace which is quite rapid here but not rapid anywhere else. So come and support us, see what's going on and see what Vindolanda is all about for yourself.