Vindolanda Day 9: Out of Context
Posted on April 30, 2024 • 2 minutes • 374 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.
When you are digging an archaeological trench you will be given a specific “context number” for the area you are working in. This could be the place you are digging (in a hole, next to the third wall) or the horizontal layer (4th century stone room sitting atop a 3rd century barracks).
I started the dig on the now infamous context 11: the big pile of rocks . Currently everyone is trying desperately to avoid having to work on context 11. I then moved to the East to context 15: a layer of unknown composition (could be a collapsed roof or maybe a floor). Its next to a wall and has some large flagstone-like rocks.
This morning I was just tidying up my part of context 11 (there is a lot of dustpan-and-brush work) when I came across this beauty:
We often find flecks of charcoal in the soil and clay but this was quite a large chunk. I very carefully extracted as much as I could (it fell apart in my fingers) and bagged it for later analysis.
After that was done, I was moved across to context 17. We’d found a wall that we thought matched a pre-existing wall to make up the two sides of a barracks. However, as one of the other diggers had dug downwards, he’d found that there was only one course (horizontal layer) of stones before he found soil: the wall was “floating” in mid-air.
This means that this wall is much newer than the barracks wall opposite which begs the question: where is the wall we expect to see? Digging further down, I may have found it, or something related to it. The situation is a bit murky due to a “robber trench ”, a cut through where the stone was salvaged, possibly in the medieval era. Tomorrow I will expand my hole to a more likely location for the wall, while the other excavator will look for further evidence of the robber trench.