Friday May 4

Quite a few pictures to update everyone on what went on this past week. In my trench I, with Andy and my trench partner Sophie, have been breaking up rocks that are too large to lift into a wheelbarrow. There have been quite a few. That's me busting up one of these monsters. I found it very cathartic. And painful at times if you hit the rock in the wrong spot. A lot like hitting a baseball wrong with an aluminum bat on a cold morning. Your hands do not thank you, that's for sure.

This is the trench I am working in at the end of Thursday, our last day for the week. Compare this to the post earlier and you can see we moved a lot of stone and rubble! Sophie and I discovered a drain that ran under the floor of the vicus building we were working in. The drain is at the back right side of the excavated section. Drains are great places to find all manner of things. We only just started excavating a section of it on Thursday and found a black burnished ware pot broken but not spread around. Someone back in the lab will be able to put the pot back together and just about the whole thing will be there. That is great because often, when digging, you find bits and pieces of pots but rarely do you find enough of a pot, or cup, or dish to be able to put it back together.

This picture is of Margaret and Fiona learning how to use a laser transit. Andy, the man in charge, is showing them the particulars before they use the range rod and rangefinder to plot in a building and some of the fort wall. Andy does this sorta thing with students and interested volunteers to give them an introduction into the other things that archaeologists do to record an excavated site. It isn't all just digging and bagging. There is some science involved, too.

This picture is of Dave, aka "Super" Dave, Steve, and Bob (left to right in picture) working on a road that separates the building I am working in from the building the ladies are working in west or uphill from me. The guys did a lot of work on that road and have excavated down to the next road surface. Often, when there was a need, existing roads would be raised up to account for the buildings around them being raised. Vindolanda is a very wet site and drainage is a key to being able to live without getting soggy. There are street drains on at least one side of every road and often on both sides of the major roadways. This week upcoming a new group of diggers will be tackling the other half of the road that needs excavating which is behind the guys.

This is a picture of a bit of samian ware (terra Sigilata) which Sophie found. It is very similar to what I found while working in Area B earlier in my season. The picture has the egg and groove sorta band around the top and a wreath decoration and most of the body of a lion or some sort of cat running or jumping. Pieces like this, that have well preserved decoration are helpful in dating the context, or layer, that they are found in. There has been research for decades into the decoration styles and maker's stamps for samian ware, amphorae, and mortaria (special kind of large mixing bowl). The stamps and decorations can sometimes help to date a context to within a decade or two which can be important when nothing else is diagnostic enough to give a date. The second picture is an amphora stamp Steve found in the roadway fill and has "L O A" as the stamp. The last letter is an "A" which is the common way of writing the equivalent of a Roman cursive Capital "A".


This is a picture of the ladies down in "the pit". Starting at the bottom from left to right is Bridget, Liz, Margaret, and Fiona. That's Andy taking a thoughtful break at the back. The ladies are down through successive layers of floors that were part of the late vicus that began around 213 and ended with the beginning of the fourth century (around 300 AD). The muck they were digging is the topmost layer of anaerobic conditions to the Antonine fort ditches which are dated to the 150-160's AD. The ladies found a couple of shoe soles (Vindolanda already has the most leather shoe parts of any Roman site in the world-over 4,000), bits of worked wood, and on the final day a very well preserved wattle fence that may have been a partition within a building, or anything really, since it was chucked into a ditch after its useful life. The next group to get in there may have to wait until the end of our upcoming dig week as it is expected to rain Sunday through Wednesday of this week.

And finally the group photo. Thanks everyone for a great week of digging, stories, and general fun. Let's do it again next year!
bottom (l to r): Sophie, Margaret, Fiona, Dave
Top (l to r): Bob, Andy, Steve, Anna, Liz, Bridget