Vindolanda Day 1: Hello (Roman) World

Posted on April 22, 2024  •  2 minutes  • 422 words

This is part of a series where I document my time volunteering at an archaeological dig in North England in April 2024. Have a look at some of the other posts to see some of the cool things I got up to.

The first day of the two-week volunteer dig at Vindolanda!

I started off by trying out a few of the other public footpaths and permissive footpaths around the site and managed to get a good vantage on the hill to the East of the fort. Unfortunately my phone camera doesn’t do the view justice.

The public and permissive footpath network in England is extensive, and a fantastic way to see the countryside.

We started the day proper at 09:30 with a tour around Vindolanda from one of the archaeologists. There have been 9 forts on this site over the around three hundred years of occupation and keeping track of what was where when is a challange. For example, the fort and vicus (extramural village) as on view today covered barely half of the fort’s boundaries at its largest. There are defensive ditches all over the site as a result of these overlapping forts.

The stonework as displayed today is around knee hight (as most Roman ruins are) but show the massive scale of even this reduced fort.

Our work for today was to clear some turf. We marked out an approximately 3 by 30 meter trench and set to work with spades and wheelbarrows.

It’s perhaps not surprising that it is hard work to remove the top 15cm of soil from almost 100 square meters, but with about twenty volunteers, we managed to hack through it in half a day. The Roman army, when on the move, would set up “marching camps ”, including a ditch and fortification around the perimeter. Its a massive physical task for an army on the move, but you begin to see how many hands could make it manageable.

Once we’d shoveled up the topsoil, it was time to begin to clean it up with trowels, thick bristled brushes and scoops. I’d picked a particularly rocky bit to deal with, so my bit of the trench does not look nearly as neat as some of the others - yet! Hopefully the large number of rocks indicates that something interesting was going on there!

The spoil heap where we dumped our sods grew a fair bit during our efforts! Its a bit jarring to see turf cut up into such neat cubes, though strangely familiar …