Day 9: Radar Love

My awareness of modern music launched with a bang around 1973, when I was given a small radio I could keep on my bedside table. Before then it was either classical music or 1950’s musicals such as South Pacific via my parents record player, so it was quite a shift to be suddenly exposed to a whole new world of pop music.

A song that made an early impression on me was Radar Love by Golden Earring. Very much a product of its time, it mixed a 60’s blues sensibility with the then-predominant glam rock. Listening to it again, I think it holds up pretty well.

Radar from 7am this morning

The image above spills the beans if you didn’t cotton on immediately: rain was the story of the day. We had heavy bursts of showers several times yesterday evening followed by more drizzle this morning, so I spent most of breakfast repeatedly refreshing MyRadar, hoping for a miracle. It came as no surprise when Andy broke the bad news at 9:30 – we would visit Magna for a trench talk in the morning, followed by pot washing in the afternoon if the weather was uncooperative. And so it proved.

The real fort wall at Magna (inner face in blue, outer in red) and edge of the rampart (yellow)

Rachel and Franki bravely led the group around Magna despite the driving rain blasting across from the Pennines. The second video summary of the Magna season was only released a few days ago, so I won’t attempt to summarize the current state of the trench again here. However, a couple of things we heard about are worth mentioning here, because they’re relevant to features I blogged about last year.

First, the fort wall stones I described last year turned out to be from a post-Roman facsimile. The real thing – with properly dressed stones and well laid – has now been identified in the newly-expanded trench, with clear evidence that it had separated from its rampart in antiquity. This is evident from the mismatch between the yellow and blue lines in the photo above, taken today.

Second, the line of stones I helped reveal on Day Six last year and described as a wall are still visible, but are more likely to be one side of a drain. However, the reason they’re still present in the same position is that their true function remains uncertain. Archaeology can be frustrating at times!

After lunch – although there were some sunny spells between the showers – it was raining enough of the time that no digging took place. Instead we polished off perhaps a dozen bags of pot/bone/glass/nails, cleaning them of mud with a toothbrush and water, leaving them to dry before later cataloging and analysis.

Post-excavation pot washing in the excavation building, and one of our completed trays

The forecast for tomorrow looks much more promising so we’re hoping to end on a positive note.

Day 8: Stop making sense

Another memorable musical milestone for me is the Talking Heads live album, Stop Making Sense, from 1984. By general acclaim it’s one of the best live albums (and concert movies) ever made and was another record that got frequent play in my student days. A unique sound and the other-worldly David Byrne: great stuff and an easy choice for today’s theme for me.

Our luck with the weather finally ran out. All three sessions were interrupted by showers, although we did manage to squeeze out around three hours of trench time overall.

Andy suggested I shift over slightly and see if the cobbled floor that disappeared yesterday could be picked up further north of the column base. Although hints of some meaningful stones did appear as I moved north, taking the level down about 10cm, a clear picture failed to emerge with no signs of the cobbled surface returning. What was so organized south of the column has truly stopped making sense to the north. Combining this with virtually no finds of any kind – beyond three or four very modestly-sized pot sherds – it was by far the quietest day for me so far this season. The image below captures the view as another shower chased us out of the trench at 3:45.

End of the day view; yesterday’s area outlined in yellow, today’s in blue. Antonine period walls (or their foundations) bordering our area are indicated by yellow cross-hatching

When the first rain break forced us to retreat to the excavation centre before lunch Andy became a talking head, giving us a brief history of the site followed by a discussion of changes in the site’s archaeological data recording system.

One valuable nugget I picked up from his presentation was that the current view of the North Field – where I spent my first two digging seasons, in 2010 and 2012 – is that it contains a temporary camp used during the construction of the first Vindolanda fort in 85 AD, rather than being the first fully-fledged fort at the site.

Roman armies on the march would construct a new camp daily, in a matter of hours, complete with a ditch, rampart and wooden post palisade, so this temporary fort might have only been occupied for a matter of weeks while the first fort was under construction, on the other side of the Stanegate road. The final image below shows the southeast corner of the ditch/rampart for this camp this afternoon.

View of the North Field from the excavation centre, line of the construction camp ditch indicated by blue dashes

Returning to the trench at 3, before the final rainstorm enveloped us half an hour later

Day 7: The Jam

OK, I have to admit it’s getting increasingly difficult to find a suitable theme song. But, having got this far I’m going to stick with it; so for Tuesday of the second week I’m picking a song that should be the archaeologists anthem, suitable for any day in the trench: “Going Underground”, by The Jam, their first #1 single from March, 1980, back when I was about to take my O-levels (including Latin). Before you groan too much, I’ve managed to squeeze out another two references from the song that really do work for today.

The first order of business for me this morning was to crack on with my beam slot. Heavy overnight rain made the trench a little trickier for everyone, but the slot had drained nicely and I finished the first stretch of it quickly. A second beam slot came off at right angles from the first and although it was initially harder for me to see, with some assistance from Andy I was able to complete the L just before lunch.

The L-shaped beam slot completed

A couple of nice finds came from the slot: first, half of a ceramic box-flue (used to move warm air inside walls) was jammed in at some point in antiquity; second an iron piece from a latch mechanism.

Section of a box flue (two views of the same find, L & R)

Latch mechanism made of iron

In the first line of today’s theme tune, Paul Weller sings “Some people might say that my life is in a rut”, but before I could be accused of any such thing I was shifted away from further slot-searching activity (Andy’s thought he could spot at least one more sprouting out of my L) to finish up the cobbled floor of our Antonine courtyard.

This was a more straightforward exercise than slot-divining, with the very compacted floor making it simultaneously satisfying and easy to pick off the looser-packed material laid on it. Amongst this soil was another small find, a 4cm long, corroded iron cylinder; Andy identified it as the collar from a spear, which would have attached the iron spearhead onto its wooden shaft (below).

Iron collar from a spear (the cylinder is still packed with soil)

A healthy diet of biscuits is a key and long-standing feature of the excavation teams at Vindolanda, but today Colin went well beyond the norm in adding to our stash of sweet treats. At teatime he produced a container of scones, along with clotted cream and – you’ve surely guessed it by now – strawberry jam. The jam. It’s always about the jam.

Strawberry jam and clotted cream scones for tea

I finished up my day back alongside “my” column base, looking to trace the cobbled floor around its eastern flank and into the area we last explored on day three. It would not play ball, however. No easy floor was to be found and instead some larger, packed stones appeared that seemed to be non-random, but at the same time not coalescing into any obvious structure. Hopefully this will become clearer tomorrow.

Day 6: Here comes the rain again

After an awkward transition to University in my first year, the second year felt quite different. I made a new set of friends, gained in confidence and it felt like I’d found my way. The Eurythmics album, “Touch” was released just before the winter term started in January 1983, opening with the hit single “Here comes the rain again”. I’m listening to the album as a write this – for the first time in more than thirty years – with chills down my spine as it takes me back to those heady days more than forty years ago.

Annie Lennox on the Touch album cover

The Met Office forecast last night for today was awful. I was resigned to a day of sitting in the cottage, forlornly watching rain slither down our windows. Although the downpour started as predicted around 6am the radar suggested there might be a chance of a break during the morning; maybe we could squeeze an hour or two in before the trench became unsafe?

Menacing, low clouds scudding away over the fields east of Vindolanda this morning

After the exciting finish on Friday I was on tenterhooks as we entered the trench at 9:30 with a strong – but happily dry – wind sweeping across from the Solway Firth. Would I be sent back to the 4th century barrack with Brigitte and Sarah, or continue in the archaeologically hot zone with my sister? In the end I left the Valkyries (as they had christened themselves last week), allowing me to reconnect with my beloved column base.

The “before” shot for today, a cobbled floor to be found

David, Jack and I joined forces to reveal more of the nicely cobbled floor beside the column base, removing the rather forlorn remains of a (presumably) 3rd century wall in the process, outlined in yellow in the image above. The same hard-packed cobbles you can see in the lower left, revealed by Pippa on Friday, proved to continue as hoped into the new area closer to the column base.

Shortly before lunch I was peeled off to continue this floor-following function southward (off the lower left of the photo), with satisfactory results, including some elements that I have to remain tight-lipped on (sorry…). The results of our efforts are below.

The “after” image; floor found successfully

One find I can show from this later floor furtling fun is in the image below: the biggest pottery fragment I’ve found in my 15 seasons of digging. I believe it’s a greyware cooking vessel, but will have to confirm the details with the Trust’s pottery specialist Cristina later.

An unusually large sherd recovered from the Antonine floor

Despite a few periods of drizzle, our luck held out until the last 15 minutes of the day. This allowed me time to shift a little further south still, where a linear, dark strip had appeared on Friday, notable also by its lack of cobbles. This is most likely a beam slot, where a now-decayed wooden timber would have lain, perhaps supporting floorboards. The slot is shown in the image below part way through excavation before teabreak, with part of the beam slot marked by yellow lines. A sample of the dark, crumbly fill in the slot was taken for environmental analysis (white bucket in the photo).

A beam slot in the Antonine floor (yellow lines); a later period post hole marked by a green square

So the rain did come, but it left us remarkably unscathed. The forecast for the rest of the week is for sunshine and showers; hopefully the song will remain the same.

Day 5: Unknown Pleasures

There’s a mini-blue moon in store for us in the UK tonight, which brings to mind a song that takes me straight back to my second term of University: Blue Monday, by New Order. The hypnotic beat of the drum machine, alongside the synth-heavy backing and bass guitar-as-lead hooked me instantly. I still have the 12-inch single of it somewhere in my parent’s attic in Leeds.

Album cover for Unknown Pleasures, by Joy Division

As you are no doubt aware, New Order rose from the ashes of the short-lived but highly influential post-punk band, Joy Division, after the untimely death of its leader, Ian Curtis. Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures, featured one of the most iconic covers of the last 50 years (above) and its title happens to be a perfect fit for the last digging day of week one.

I should add that by tea break I had a completely different theme for the day in mind, as a relatively quiet day played itself out. However, the last 20 minutes of the Friday post-tea session turned everything on its head.

Quern stone reused in the floor of our 4th century barrack building

Brigitte, Sarah and I continued where we left off, in a 4th century building tasked with finding the next level beneath the existing floor. Marta confirmed its date, but was less certain in identifying it as a barrack room, due to its unusual size and shape.

There is a notably raised ridge of central flags running east-west through the middle, assumed to be due to support from an earlier – presumably third century – wall beneath, while the north and south halves lack such support and are therefore significantly slumped.

As we probed further under the flags, it became clear that the building occupants had tried to counteract this slumping by adding loose fill and additional flag stones over it; this is a common occurrence at Vindolanda, although the slumps are more often due to poorly filled ditches from earlier forts.

Mortarium fragment

After an hour or so we suddenly broke out of the dark soil that could have grown some fine tomatoes and entered a tan-colored, clay-rich level below. Finds were few, but Sarah recovered a rather corroded copper-alloy stud in the corner and the bottom of a nice glass vessel; my only finds of note were several chunky, corroded nails and a decent sherd from a mortarium.

What of those unknown pleasures? Drone shots were due over the weekend, so we were all under orders to leave the trench squeaky clean. Marta felt in our case we didn’t need three people to finish up with a tidying trowel scrape; at the same time, Pippa needed a hand getting her area sorted out so I was sent to assist her.

Unfortunately (from your point of view), her troweling turned up something both significant and unexpected enough that I can’t describe it here, and in helping her tidy up Marta and I only added to the intrigue of the thing-that-cannot-be-described-or-I’ll-be-in-trouble. Further work will be needed to properly figure it out, hence the unknown part; being involved at the end was definitely a pleasure. Sorry to leave you on tenterhooks.

The forecast for next week doesn’t look great, but it’s hard to complain after a dry, mostly very warm week with no time lost to rain. By Monday my shoulder pain should have eased, general fatigue will have been replaced by youthful vigor and the battle can recommence.

Day 4: Dead or Alive?

This was a day of spinning, twisting my way right round the column base. Those of you who remember the mid-80’s might already have guessed the song connection for today: Dead or Alive’s: “You spin me round”, a hit in early 1985 when I was about to finish my degree and still working out who I was.

View of the northeast corner of the fort this morning

This was a surprising assignment to me; I’d expected to be moved elsewhere because completing the circumnavigation meant disturbing two possible walls. In one case this potential lay in just two, colorful but decaying sandstones, whose geology and slight angle to each other was strongly suggestive of the typical curved wall from another of the enigmatic Severan period roundhouses (see image below). These were built shortly before the last stone fort was erected in 213 and to this day are poorly understood; however, with so little of the original footprint remaining there was little to be gained by keeping this lonely pair around any longer.

The column base at 9:30 this morning, showing possible Severan roundhouse remnants (blue) and late-period wall rubble (red)

By the time I was ready for a cuppa at 2:30 I had completed the full tour round the base, leaving it sitting naked in all its glory: almost a meter square, about 60cm high. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations this evening suggest it weighs close to a ton; surely no-one would carve and place such a monster simply for decorative effect, it must have been there to support a building?

The (almost) fully exposed column base

After tea I shifted southwards, into a 4th century building with a wonderfully varied flagged floor that includes the reuse of two quern stones. Brigitte, Sarah and I removed the floor flags from a two by five meter section in the southwest corner and had just enough time to begin finding a new level among the very loose, black, organic soil beneath.

New assignment after tea, starting to remove the floor from a 4th century building

Now four days into a tiring week I think I am indeed feeling more Dead than Alive, so much so that I forgot to take a photo of our floor-drop at the end of the day; I’ll have to fix that tomorrow. Time for a well-earned sleep.

Day 3: Ace of Base

Beware of ear-worms. The 1995 single “Beautiful Life” by Ace of Base is a perfect example; now that I’ve played it again I can’t get it out of my head… And yes, it’s a clue to the theme of the digging day for me. Are we having fun yet?

It was an unexpectedly mobile day for me, with four distinct phases of activity in two different parts of the trench. I say unexpected, because at 9am this morning there was every reason to believe I had at least a couple more days with the J-crew, removing the “finger” between the smithy and the east wall.

At 9:15, as Pippa and I made our daily walk up the hill from the cafe, through the fort and on up to the Excavation Center we failed to notice that the 45 year old, yellow-flecked-with-rust dumper truck was missing from its normal spot beside the east fort wall. It therefore came as a complete surprise when Andy announced it was out of action at least until the afternoon, meaning that new assignments awaited the six of us who had been working alongside it.

The new site for the day, at the eastern (top on this image) end of building 8, yesterday’s in green; an interesting circular stone indicated by a yellow arrow

Four of us were reassigned to building 8, whose floor needs lowering, ultimately down to the Antonine (stone fort 1, 160-200AD) to match the intriguing column base revealed by the period 4 team, shown in the top right corner of the image below.

The morning session saw us take a few inches of cobble and soil down onto a clay-rich surface, pocked with both the classic grainy, yellow/white sandstone characteristic of the Antonine-period fort, as well as several chunks of ruddy orange CBM (ceramic building material).

A morning’s worth of scraping down the floor of building 8 (blue), and the area I returned to complete after lunch (yellow)

After lunch the dumper truck had been reanimated, so the J-crew returned to our previous tasks by the smithy. However, before I could get started with the mattock again Marta asked me to return to building 8, to finish up an island of cobbles we hadn’t had time for in the morning (see image above).

This immediately proved to be a blessing, because a nice – although incomplete – spindle whorl popped out of the soil in my first few trowel sweeps over the cobbles (see below). These were used during spinning to weigh down the woolen thread and although these are a common find on Romano-British sites, this was the first of its kind for me. They also happen to be of special significance to Marta, as she has published a key study on the assemblage from Vindolanda and Corbridge in a 2018 paper, so she was a happy camper when I brought it over for recording as a small find.

My first small find of the season, and first spindle whorl

Before tea break there was time for 15 minutes of hacking away at the finger of soil beside the eastern wall, but there was a final twist still in store for me on day three.

After tea Andy decided we needed a clearer definition of the column base, so I dropped the mattock with undue haste and returned once more to building 8, spending a giddy 45 minutes tracing the beautifully carved stone on two sides. It turned out to be truly massive: perhaps a meter square at the base, sloping artistically up to a circle of about 40cm diameter on its perfectly flat top. Now we have to solve the puzzle of what substantial structure it supported and where is its presumed partner?

The Antonine period column base on at the end of the day

I’ll close by returning to the theme of the day: it is indeed a beautiful life when you get the opportunity to be at Vindolanda, excavating such an expertly-made piece of masonry. A very satisfying day.

Day 2: From The Buggles to The Smiths??

Yes, I was lacking in inspiration for today’s post title. Yesterday’s 80’s band fit pretty well, so I decided to continue in that mode and picked the melancholic indie rock band, The Smiths (who could ever forget their morose 1984 hit, “Heaven knows I’m miserable now”?).

Before I dig in to today’s action (see what I did there…) I need to fix an oversight from yesterday: I failed to give any real detail about where in the fort we’re working. So, below is an annotated screenshot from the Trusts latest video update, which was probably shot on Friday last week (see the video for further info about the latrines and drains), showing the area I worked on with Diana yesterday (blue crosshatched rectangle) and where I continued this morning (red).

Drone view showing where I was working yesterday (blue) and this morning (red)

In the morning session I continued tracing the Bidwell plastic sheet southward, toward the northwest corner of the 4th century centurion’s quarters. Shortly before lunch I seemed to have finally found the bottom of it, revealing that some stones from the corner were either missing or had been inadvertently removed during the Bidwell excavation. There also seemed to be a set of original, firmly located stones beyond the plastic, perhaps forming a wall in line with the centurion quarter’s western edge.

The western edge of the sheet will have to be chased down by someone else because, along with half a dozen others, I was shifted to a completely new spot for the afternoon. Below is the way things looked as I left the plastic age, with the possible wall outlined in yellow:

A final view look at my section of the “Bidwell zone” before I was moved elsewhere for the afternoon

Well, what about the Smiths I hear you ask? Andy gave us a quick overview of our new assignment, which was adjacent to… a very late period smithy. This one – visible as a three meter oval of stones in the image below – replaced an earlier and larger version to its north whose floor had slumped badly, due to the ditch from a much earlier fort (period IV, 105AD) beneath it. The same ditch system had also caused havoc with the main fort wall, resulting in its collapse and requiring a hasty repair in the 3rd or 4th century.

The new area for the J-crew marked in green, my section in red, next to a late-period smithy marked with a yellow circle

Between the smithy and the wall of the last stone fort a roughly six meter long, one meter wide, one meter high finger of earth needs to be removed, so the J-crew – John, Jackie and I – set to work on it after lunch. We each used slightly different approaches; I decided a mattock was the weapon of choice and spent a happy couple of hours hacking away at the top 50cm or so of the “finger”. A handful of pot sherds, a lump of slag and multiple bone fragments appeared amongst the mix of soil, stone and clay.

A very robust jaw, probably from a pig or boar was the most notable find for me; based on their size, I’m guessing many of the other bones I found were from the same animal.

Pig/boar jawbone from the afternoon

The before/after shots below show the afternoon’s progress; we’ve got at least a couple more days of work to clear the finger.

View of my new area at 1pm, with the finger to be removed (blue) between the smithy (yellow) and eastern fort wall

The same view at 4pm, showing the results of my afternoon labours in red

My upper body got a significant workout this afternoon, thanks to the isolated nature of this spot; with no easy way to barrow the spoil to the heap, we had to toss the soil and stones into the trusty dumper, parked adjacent to the fort wall. This necessitated a basketball-style pass, thrusting each bucket of soil rapidly away from my chest, to eject the material with enough force to reach the hopper. However, larger stones could be thrown directly from a distance, initially generating a very satisfying clang in the empty bucket.

A much anticipated cooler day is in store for us tomorrow, meaning I might get to finally try out my new trousers with built-in kneepads, something that every fashion-conscious digger should own.

Day 1: Living in the Plastic Age

At the dawn of MTV in 1981, the first video to be played was “Video killed the radio star” by a short-lived band, The Buggles. The song was from their debut album, “The Age of Plastic”, released the previous year; the classic synth-pop caught my teenage ear and I remember listening to it intently in the year before I went to university.

Cover image from the 1980 Buggles album, Age of Plastic (from Wikipedia)

That same year, 1980, archaeologist Paul Bidwell began a five-year excavation in the northeast quadrant of the fort at Vindolanda. For reasons that weren’t elaborated upon during the induction tour for period 5 this morning, the project ended after only a year, the trench lined with large transparent plastic sheets before being back-filled.

Bidwell didn’t publish his findings for five years and the descriptions of what he found aren’t always internally consistent, but at least the limits of his excavation are obvious 46 years later (this is in stark contrast to what I encountered last season at Magna Fort, when the limits of Victorian backfilling had to be determined without such assistance).

And so another season of digging has begun. We really kicked off period 5 with a scorcher, requiring shorts and my wide-brimmed, Indiana Jones-style hat. There was nary a cloud in the sky, minimal breeze and the mercury hit the high 70’s.

Our 25-person crew of volunteers has more first-time diggers than I can recall in any previous session, with almost half the team first-timers. I was paired with one of them: Diana, from Romania. Along with most of the team, we were tasked with removing an area of the 1980’s backfill down to the Bidwell plastic. The session produced a few sherds of pottery, including a nice triangle of rim from a bowl and a fragment of mortarium (below) as well as a flattened, white plastic drinking cup.

A couple of sherds among the backfill

In my haste to begin, no “before” image was taken so here’s the view of our efforts at 4pm; a start made, if not very dramatic progress in the region outlined in blue.

Plastic exposed, backfill removed on day one (outlined in blue)

As you can see, although we attempted to follow the Buggles recommendation from the fifth track on Age of Plastic: “Clean, clean”, the decaying plastic sheeting doesn’t make that easy. Hopefully we can properly clear the plastic from this section tomorrow, but exposing the Roman surface once again.

Last of the sun on day one, near Hadrian’s Wall