The first week for the digging-period 4 team is complete and there’s a fresh buzz of excitement due to the vicus trench being reopened. The focus there in the 2014 and 2015 seasons was on two buildings from the 3rd century vicus (civilian settlement outside the fort), which are thought to overlay the area around the principia (fort HQ) from the last pre-Hadrianic fort. The digging left the 3rd C walls intact, going down beneath their original floors to explore the anaerobic layers beneath; Sean and I were lucky enough to be assigned to dig there in 2014.
After a stretch of dry weather over the last few weeks the groundwater level has reduced enough that the period 4 team began working there again. However, the surprise (to me at least) was that they began on Monday by deturfing a large section just to the south of those two vicus buildings:
With hindsight, this had been mentioned in a post on the Vindolanda Trust’s excavation blog towards the end of last season – the aim in the expanded trench is to go beneath the rampart of the Severan period fort (AD213) and explore the pre-Hadrianic fort in a new area. The Severan period has its own enigmatic features, so this could provide some exciting finds even before getting down to the older levels. On an image previously posted by the Trust on their blog here I’m showing below where Sean and I dug in the fort in 2013 (red arrow, left), where Sean and I were in 2014 (yellow and magenta arrows lower right) and the newly opened trench (roughly) outlined in blue:
Just to whet your appetite, here’s another example of the amazing stuff that can come out of the anaerobic mud, a well-preserved comb, pulled out from the vicus already this week:
Digging Vindolanda 