Vindolanda Day 5: Raising the roof

Posted on April 26, 2024  •  3 minutes  • 503 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.

Today was the last day of the first week of my period excavating at Vindolanda. Its been quite a week and its incredible to see the progress we’ve made in that time. Between the 25 of us, we’ve removed turf and brought down to the 4th/3rd century almost 100 square metres of land. We’ve found some fascinating artifacts, sketched out a building of unknown use (probably not a barracks due to its size) and identified some pieces the previous excavators didn’t notice. In particular we found an image of a dolphin and a “good luck charm” etched into the roadway in much the same way as you see these “charms” drawn on bathroom walls today.

I, along with two others, have been moved to the far side of the dig where we were shoveling a large amount of dirt in order to get down to the interesting layer as quickly as possible. Its not clear whether the layer we are at is the floor of a building or the collapsed roof of the building. My money is on the latter as I think we are in a small room next to one that is being excavated to my left which has a very obvious floor about 10cm lower down.

Here is a picture to show you the situation as far as I understand it. Note that everything I say could be wrong, or could be reinterpreted in the future. In green is the main road, the via principia, although at some point it goes through a wall (or rather a wall was built across it and a building used it as part of a floor, we think). This was excavated by the previous session. In yellow we have a rainwater ditch, followed by walls in red. My slice of the trench is in cyan and in the background in magenta is the huge pile o’ rocks that I was working on previously.

I said I wasn’t going to mention small finds, but some of the more boring pieces I might show. For example, today I came across two small pieces of pottery. Pottery is an incredibly common find on the site (to the extent that I think I’m one of the last diggers to find some).

Here is the pottery piece as I found it in the ground (after cleaning it off a little with a brush). Facing upwards is the inner rim of the top of a pot. And here it is after removal, showing some decorative etchings in the side

The weather was fine today: cold but very sunny. It was perfect outdoor-nap-weather much unlike yesterday where it hailed out of the blue. The weather in this part of the world is always variable so many layers are advisable!