Vindolanda Day 2: Spare no quarter

Posted on April 23, 2024  •  2 minutes  • 400 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 2024-2028 SMC (consent to modify a monument, i.e. excavate) at Vindolanda has been called “Castrum”. The idea is to uncover the final quarter of the fort that hasn’t been investigated fully. There have been partial excavations in the past and we’ve found both the pit and spoil heap from one of them already. However, this quarter is still turfed over and hides the layers of the forts from us.

Even on some maps (here the OpenStreetMap, credit to OSM contributors), you can see the lack of detail in the final quarter of the fort. It is this quarter that we are hoping to reveal, one trench at a time.

As always, I have some before and after pictures. My section of the trench has a large amount of rubble (possibly a collapsed wall?) and getting all the dirt out from between the rocks is a real pain. Its a lot of scraping against stone, then awkwardly positioning a bucket to catch the dirt. The roots of the grass have also gotten well ingrained into the rock pile and hacking through those is troublesome when you are also trying to be careful not to break anything interesting that you might come across.

Here’s the “before” pic for my trench, taken this morning: And the after taken at about four in the afternoon:

Its real murder on the knees, in no small part due to the fact that there isn’t a level surface to kneel on in order to work. Both kneepads and a kneeling mat still left me sore and stiff.

A little down the trench, they encountered a felt carpet set down a few generations ago when this area was last excavated. Its a nice level surface to work down to (not like our pile of rocks!), and makes a very pleasing looking trench! By the way, I won’t be posting about small finds (not that we’ve really found anything) without the express permission of Vindolanda, since we’ve been warned about night thieves: apparently folks go and do their own illegal excavations if they know there’s something good there. So far I’ve found a lot of rocks…