Vindolanda Day 11: Clink, Clink, Clink, Thunk

Posted on May 2, 2024  •  2 minutes  • 335 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.

Yesterday we were trying to find a wall that faced another, well defined wall of the barracks. We’d found a floating, 4th century course of stones, but nothing underneath. There were some promising looking rocks that it was hypothesised might belong to one of the round houses set up possibly as a refugee camp in the Severan period as shown in the example from elsewhere in the fort in the picture above.

However, if that is the case, we didn’t find the rest of the round house, as we removed a few cubic meters of soil (with varying amounts of care: some by spade and mattock, some by trowel and brush) but found nothing of note.

In fact, we didn’t even find any small finds or pottery, perhaps suggesting that someone else (possibly Eric Birley in the 1930s) had been there before us.

At the end of the day, perhaps taking pity on me and my disappearing wall, the dig supervisor moved me to a slightly different section. There is a wall that looks like a dividing wall in the barracks block that a colleague of hers had been working on. Very nice and simple: she’d exposed three stones in a nice facing row demarcating the southern edge of the wall. There’s a rubble core and then another set of facing stones.

My task was to just clean up the stones, expose and define the wall slightly better. There was a gap that she hadn’t excavated where there should be another stone to line up with the rest of the wall further on and I was to define that stone too.

But when I went in with my trowel, it went “Clink, clink, clink, thunk.” Seems like every wall I look for disappears…