Dan Snow's History Hit - Vindolanda

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

Dan finds out what's going on with recent excavations at Vindolanda, one of the largest Roman forts near Hadrian's Wall. All manner of discoveries have been made, including the largest collection of Roman footwear found anywhere in the world.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm standing on the sparkling shores of the Solent, the piece of water that

joins the English Channel. It's a strait that separates southern England from the Isle of Wight, one of the biggest islands of this little North Atlantic archipelago that I'm lucky enough to be standing in. It's a hot day, it's one of the hottest days of the year here. It's a hole, 30 degrees centigrade, yes listeners in other countries, that counts as melting hot in the UK. And this is a good bit of water, I'm just looking out over Cowes now where the first America's Cup was held. It's never been held here since because Britain's never won the America's Cup and the winner gets to decide where the tournament is held.

The regatta. Looking down towards Hurst Castle in the west where Charles I was imprisoned by Parliament while they worked out what they were going to do with him before chopping his head off. To the east I've got Portsmouth, the towers of the gleaming spires of Portsmouth over there Britain's premier naval base, HMS Victory you all know about Portsmouth if you listen to this podcast the Titanic sailed

down this stretch of water on its maiden voyage out of Southampton Mary Rose turned over just over there and actually just where I'm standing now we think is where Vespasian, when he was a general, general commanding a legion where he crossed the Solent and conquered the Isle of Wight for Rome little do you know that one day he was wearing the imperial purple himself he'd be an emperor but on Claudius's invasion of Britain Vespasian was just legionary commander and that brings us to the subject of this podcast look at this I've actually got a

relevant one this time this is about roman britain but it's not really about the southern tip of roman britain where i am now it's the very very northern tip it's about hadrian's wall it's about vinderlander fort now people will have heard of hadrian's wall of course one of the great sights of the world but what perhaps fewer people know about is the hadrian's Wall was not just a static defensive line but was a kind of defence in depth it's the name given almost to a concept as defence in depth there are cavalry patrols to the north skirmishes forts both behind and in front of the wall and one of those forts is extremely important Roman site called Vindoland it's one of the most

important Roman sites anywhere in the former Roman Empire. It has some of the best preserved material anywhere from the Roman Principate. It is an absolutely remarkable place and I went last year to have a walk around the fort. I was shown around by the legendary Andrew Burley and Barbara Burley. They are, you know, total rock stars in the archaeological community and they took me around Vindolanda, the way they go. So enjoy this podcast. It first went out as an exclusive bit of audio on History Hit TV. If you want to get our next fix for history, where we've got exclusive audio,

hundreds of history documentaries, we've got the live weekly Zoom. It's with Susanna Lipscomb this week, the live Zoom. I hope people will be joining us for that one. And basically awesome, what can I say? If you want to do that, you can go and use the code POD1, exclusive podcast listeners. You just type POD1 and you get a month for free and then you get the first month just one pound euro or dollar we've got a new podcast out at the moment as we've got how and

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So all of the podcasts we've ever done about the First and Second World War, it's all going on one feed and you can listen to that too. In the meantime, enjoy this little trip around Vindolanda. Andrew, great to be back in Vindollander it's been it's been 10 years man you don't look a day older oh charming as ever i feel about 10 years older because we found so much stuff since you were last here so don't make it another 10 years before you come back

what i said about barbara thank you very much you're the curator of so are you in touch so how does the responsibilities break down between you guys? Basically, he digs up all the stuff in his team, and then it comes to me in the conservation labs, and then from that point, it's my responsibility to clean, preserve, and then display what we find. And let's just quickly rehearse. Vindaloo, it's a fort, it sits just to the south of Hadrian's Wall.

How does it interact with the defences on Hadrian's Wall? does it how does it interact with the defenses on hadrian's wall well it starts as you say before hadrian's wall it becomes then a construction fort for hadrian's wall so it's instrumental in the actual building of the thing then it becomes a garrison fork for hadrian's wall when they don't have forts on the wall and even when they build those it's in such a good spot they think ah let's keep it and they keep building and modifying it and it becomes a really powerful base from that point onwards. And it even outlives Hadrian's Wall by going for another 300 or 400 years after the ball is abandoned. Obviously, it's a wonderful site, the stones, the archaeology.

But what is it about the material culture? What is it about the objects that make Vindolanda globally significant? Well, it's mostly the organic objects. So the wooden objects, the writing tablets, the other wooden objects that we have, as well as the leather textiles, those types of things, as well as the objects that often survive, the metal objects and such, we have at very, very good preservation levels. So it's all preserved from one site, and we keep excavating, we keep finding new things, so it's not stagnant either so i think that's what makes it kind of internationally um sort of significant in the

in the world of archaeology and why explain explain to people listening to us abroad what is it about the geography of this site the the chemistry of the ground that means we do have this preservation we're in a wet damp environment in rural northumberland we've got lots of heavy boulder clays the romans use those as building materials and as sealants. And it locks the oxygen out, locks the air that we breathe out, and it puts everything in a sort of archaeological deep freeze in that sense. So things that would normally rot away, completely disappear, just don't. They're there for us to find in almost the same condition as they went into the ground 2,000 years ago. And you just can't put a value on that because you're seeing the full range of stuff.

You're not just getting a few dusty stones and bits of pot. You're getting literally everything they've left behind. And that adds so much context, so much color, so much life to everything that you're looking at and makes the data sets, the material, comparable with a huge range of stuff. So it's the volume, it's the variety, and it's given us such a rich picture of the people who were here 2,000 years ago, a picture that we couldn't get reasonably from any other way.

Tell me about your family's journey to this point now, because we're now in a giant, shining, gleaming museum, world-class museum, and there's this huge archaeological site, ongoing excavations every year, thousands of volunteers involved. That's not how it began. No, it began with a farmer's field, five pounds in the bank, some borrowed tools from the Durham University department, no museum, no toilets. In fact, well, there was a toilet.

It was an Alsan toilet, which had to be emptied by the director of excavations. No telephone line, no power, no water. And what happened in that field is that the team, the first Vindolanda team, started excavating a little bit of part of the site, and people got very passionate and excited about what was going on and came to visit. And were there humps and bumps there? Why did you know you were going to excavate here? Vindolanda was always known about as a site because the final fort here number nine out of the sequence made a significant mound in the landscape but nobody had a clue of

what really was going on underneath that and it wasn't until really the nine early 1970s when my dad started excavating under the foundations the stone buildings that he hit this incredible wooden underworld that you know information about this site and and pressure and everything else just my dad started excavating under the foundations of the stone buildings that he hit this incredible wooden underworld. Information about this site and pressure and everything else just exploded with the finding of the first writing tablets, boots and shoes. And at that point, we realised we were onto something truly incredibly significant. We're talking about the writing tablets because they are the things perhaps that people would have heard of all the way around the world.

I think what's most significant about the writing tablets is it's everyday stuff. It's not kings and queens. It's about socks and underpants, which was the first tablet that was found back in 1973, through things like a birthday party invitation. So it's one woman inviting another woman to come to her birthday party in order to make her day more pleasant. I mean, these types of things, these real personal sorts of information, things about kind of festivals that they're going to have, what kind of food they're getting in, everyday things. It's not something that's just in a history book. It's about real people.

It's personalities. And, you know, it's like a soap opera. And you can get to chase people around this site over a 30- or 50-year period of excavation. We may find a letter 100 meters away from the next letter, but it may refer to the same person. And you then learn a little bit more about their lives, their character, what they're like. One of my favorite characters is a guy called Virilis. He's the vet. And we have a letter where he's writing to another vet and he's

really upset because this guy has borrowed his favorite pair of castration shears and hasn't returned them. And you have to think, well, all right, that's an event in his life and he's writing this angry letter. But think about it from their perspective. You know, if the doctor is out and you need to see somebody for a medical complaint, that day you have to go and visit Virilis the vet and he's not in a good mood. So, you know, that starts to add that character and life to the dusty remains, which you just can't get in any other way. And we're also finding out about the women and the children, and it's just not men that are based here, and the evidence that we're getting from the organic objects, things like the shoes showing us the size of their feet.

You know, you can't say that a small kind of shoe was actually for a six-foot-tall Roman soldier. It's got to be for a child. And so these people are living out their lives, doing the normal things similar to what we do, and writing correspondence and just building up their lives here. And not just in times of dullness or general activity, also in times of war and extreme conflict. When we've got our severe-en and forts here and our big ditches,

50% or slightly more, 51%, 52% of the footwear in those ditches during that conflict come from women and children. And these are people who lived through that conflict. They saw people's heads mounted on poles on the ramparts. Their lives would have occasionally been under threat. And they are, again, a hidden part of these wars that we learn about in history books, the people who were really traumatised and had to live through it. So by finding their stuff, we can start to tell their story and also start to realise that they were actually there.

They suddenly start to exist in the landscape where we had no evidence from them before. I'm just going to ask about these wooden writing tablets because that's confusing. I mean, are they big chunks of wood on which people scratch notes? How do they work? They look like modern day postcards. They're about the same size, same thickness. They're made of little slivers of birch or alder, which are taken from a tree and then pressed flat and treated with the chemicals. So you can write with an ink pen on them. And they have an ink pen, which looks like an old fashioned fountain pen, which you can write with an ink pen on them. And they have an ink pen, which looks like an old-fashioned fountain pen, which you can fill with ink. We've got a couple of examples in the museum, wood and iron.

The ink is made of gum arabic and carbon and a bit of spit, so it's about as good as modern-day quink or another brand that you might want to use. And you can get two or three lines out of it. They write in Latin cursive scripts, and unlike capitals, it's sort of joined-up handwriting. And as Barbara was saying, it's everybody writing because to exist in a military landscape

where the Roman army write everything down, you've got to learn to read and write too, to be fully engaged. You're a disadvantage if you don't do this. So they're teaching everybody to do it. Do you guys have a whiteboard with red string and every time you come up

with a new character, sort of building this centuries long soap opera of who's who and who's going out with who and who's nicking stuff off who we're getting it we're getting a huge book together on this subject and it's yeah it's just expanding all the time a couple of years ago we found another 40 or 50 names last year on the excavation we found something fairly prosaic, a Roman brick or tile, but it had another seven people's names carved on it. And it's great. You're getting thousands of characters, and it just gets more and more every year. Yeah, talk to me about the plans to go on excavation.

How big is the site now, and how big do you think it can get? Well, we're going to keep excavating. We have another, we're in the middle of a five-year SMC, which is our consent to actually excavate. We probably have another hundred years, probably, on a small estimate of excavation. We have programs and ways of looking at how we have to expand for the storage and everything else for all these wonderful objects that we are developing and pulling out. We have just last year completed a new extension on the museum here to house the wooden underworld, so all of these wooden objects.

So we're continuing to expand, we're continuing to develop. We don't know what the future is going to bring because every time you put the spade in the ground, something new can come out. And this is seen every year because we don't know. And that's the excitement from it is that you know Andrew goes up on site in April and I have to be ready for whatever comes out I have to say when riding tablets come out everything else in my life stops they they get first priority

and you know that that's that's the excitement for it you know the tablets are so fragile but the site stretches about a kilometre long down the side of a Roman road that we know of at the moment. And of course, outside of that, you'll get Roman farms and out-satiation settlements and other things which are associated.

Of course, this is just one fort of 14 along the frontier. So in terms of how much have we got left to do? Thousands of years, so we better get cracking. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt

and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age

and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Now, that's something that struck me when I came here 10 years ago and had a chat with you, because you told, I said, Windland just must be totally unique.

And you said it's actually not. You think the other forts here in this very remote part of England, you think the other forts could be just as rich? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And particularly those who've got the same long length of occupation. very remote part of England, you think the other forts could be just as rich? Oh absolutely, absolutely and particularly those who've got the same long length of occupation so they've got buildings on top of each other taking advantage of our landscape and our geology and the Roman way of doing stuff. So the preservation we've got here certainly exists at Carlisle, exists at the Fort of Magna near Greenhead and several other sites that we know of. These places aren't being excavated at the moment,

but in the future one would have to hope that they will be because the only way we can now compare what we've got at Vindolanda, because the data set is so huge, there's so much interest coming from this site, is to look at another one of these settlements to find out, you know, is this truly unique or is it not? The mind boggles. Now it just talked me through because the other thing that's fascinating about midland is this is this long there's a there's a cavalry um outpost

here from before hadrian's wall uh talk to me about the end of vinderlander because i remember being very struck in fact you you told me some of those harrowing it's always stayed with me uh this this the story of the sort of blocking up the gates and stuff talk to me about what happens when the roman army leaves the wall and this part of Britain starts fending for itself. Well, you've got a huge power vacuum once the soldiers are starting to be pulled out, particularly the field army in Roman Britain, and they are the real professional soldiers of the period.

And the soldier farmers, the people who have been left as frontier guardsmen at the end of the Roman period, they're just cut off, they're abandoned, not just on Britain, but right across the Limes on the Roman frontiers of the Roman Empire. So they then form the nucleus of this new society, but they're on their own. And they've got to look within themselves for leadership. And you get local warband leaders coming to the fore, people who take and seize authority and control, and decide to hold down territories of these forts, to charge taxes to people who come past the gates and to use the landscape. And effectively, you've got those war bands holding forth in this area right the way through probably the 5th and into the early 6th century.

And it would have been a very dangerous place to live. But they also serve a function. Their function really is to start separating out the various peoples who eventually become Scotland and England and the various different kingdoms of the 6th and 7th centuries before that. And of course they help to stop Irish raiders penetrating from the west and eventually they are a little bit of a barrier to people coming in from the east too. And they keep that Roman trade network,

that route that Hadrian's Wall is, a linear route across the country, open for people who they allow to use. So interesting times. But of course there aren't many of them. There aren't 600 soldiers here. They're probably a community of a couple of hundred people, and so they have to block the gates up.

So the forts like Vindolanda are no longer military bases. They become castles. They become refuges, and they become places where people fearfully look outside the walls and look to themselves rather than having a global view. It sounds like it could be quite a grim time. In terms of the collections here, is it exciting for you as a curator? I mean, how significant, if you look at all, any kind of equivalent museum from right across the Roman Empire, from the Middle East, North Africa, right up to here, how significant is the material that you're

able to handle here? Well, I have to say I love it. But yes, I think it is quite significant. It shows that sort of breadth. Most, well, a lot of other museums, they collect from multiple different areas, multiple different sites. So even some of our big national museums or some of the smaller museums, they have, you know, composite collections. Whereas here, I think the strength and the reason that we were given our designated collection status was because we collect from a single site. And the wealth of information about everyday people, it's not just, you know, the gold and silver plate that you get in a lot of big museums or, you know the the gold and silver plate that you get in a lot of big museums or you know the the high shiny bits it's it's that that everyday life that that what would be like if we were probably

in roman times you know if we were collecting what we have about ourselves that's what we get here at ventolanda so the significance of the collection here is not only the organics that don't survive at other sites but also that kind of breadth of time. And most of our stuff, it's actually quite a short period of time that all of the organics come from, but it's the actual sheer amount of them that is amazing. And everybody loves the shoes here. I think that's one of those things, and I think it's because we can relate to them. We still know what a shoe is like

We still know what the difference between a good and a bad shoe If you have to walk a long distance if the shoe is uncomfortable and you can start to look at the Roman shoes and say Oh, well, that's really interesting We can start to research the shoes by saying well if it's a shoe size that person was probably this tall This person wore the shoe out. You can start to tell if the woman was pregnant by how she walks in her shoes. You can start to see disabilities that come through, limps and how they're wearing them, also things about stature. And it's amazing.

So the research that goes on behind the collection, so you can come and you can see things, and then it's the research that kind of boosts all that interpretation that the visitors are saying that is so important and at Vindolanda we try to as much as possible support that research. Well let's go look at some of the objects. So I'm just looking now at a skull that's missing two big holes on either side of the skull. Were those inflicted before death do you think or afterwards? Those are inflicted before death. They're battle injuries. We've got on one side you can see where the skull's been bashed in. On the other it's a sharp implement like a sword or a spear has gone

through the skull and then his head's been decapitated and you can't see it on the case here but if you flip it up you can see the puncture mark under his upper jaw where the pole has been inserted to mount his head on the rampart. Local boy, grew up all his life in our region. We know this from the isotopic analysis on his teeth. Died sometime during the Severan Wars in Britain, so beginning of the 3rd century. Found in a fort ditch. But last year and the year before, we pulled another one of his teeth,

a couple of his teeth out, sent them for analysis, DNA work, and found out that on his paternal side, his father's side, he's Italian. So that makes his story just a whole lot more interesting. How on earth did he get into a position where he had his head cut off, mounted on a pole on a rampart to warn other people, presumably, this is what happens to you if you mess with Rome. Oh, I've heard about these. Yeah, so what we're looking at here are two very different types of ultra-rare artefacts,

Roman boxing gloves. Original, beautifully preserved, made of leather, boxing gloves from a cavalry barrack that was abandoned before Hadrian's Wall was built. How unusual is it to find boxing gloves from nearly 2,000 years ago in the UK? I can't overstate how unusual this is. These are the only surviving examples

that we know of from the entire Roman Empire. Now, for some reason, I always associate this museum with shoes and socks. You've got a big collection, haven't you? We've got a huge collection of footwear, but it's also really nice to get some textiles some bits of clothing as well and unfortunately we don't have any roman underpants or anything like that but what we do have are several little bits of socks and this complete version here of a child's sock which is made of stitched together

other little bits of cloth and clothing and when you get something like that you just get that instant connection with the people we all still wear shoes and socks. We can relate to what we're looking at. And that's so wonderful. And shoes, a few shoes here. In fact, everywhere you look in this place, there are shoes. How many have you got? We've got over seven and a half thousand shoes now in this collection. It's growing. Estimates vary on how many more we can find, but probably tens of thousands more. And again, each one of those artifacts relates completely back to an individual in the past and so that's incredibly useful because we can learn so much about people from what they're wearing on their feet and that might is that unprecedented

anywhere else in the empire they find that sort of that amount of footwear no at the moment vinderlander collection of footwear here is the largest by two or three times the amount of its if its nearest rivals if you want to put it that way, from any other site in the empire. If you could tell me who you are. I'm Barbara Burley and I'm the curator for the Vindolanda Trust. Show me your favourite cabinet. Right, this one's my favourite because it's the jewellery. It's got all of the beautiful kind of shiny blingy bits, but it's also about their personal choices that they made and how they wanted to portray themselves. So at one end we have the lovely jet objects that are probably

imported from someplace like Whitby in North Yorkshire and we have lovely carved ornaments there that they would have chosen to wear all black all gorgeous through to kind of quite nice bright brooches and copper alloys and silvers with enamels. And then at this end of the case, we've got things like finger rings. Now, lots of these you could wear today because they don't look that unusual in design. But some of my absolute favorites is one of the silver rings that says Matre Patre, which means mom and dad, as well as we've got glass rings we've got gold rings the one that's in the center just there is the gorgeous medusa cameo ring so again showing that kind of

ancient sort of mythology and just normal everyday things we do have a few earrings they are some of the few bits of gold that we have in collection because we just don't get the gold you know that you wouldn't lose gold you would go and find it um so we have very little do you do does the jewelry the smaller bits jewelry do you tend to find them down the drains i mean or are they just going to uniformly spread over the site uh yes a bit of both often down drains um that is a great place to find things coins and small bits of jewellery. We often find them scattered on floors, you know, so things like beads around floor surfaces, belt buckles and strap ends get just dropped

and intaglios, which are the carved gemstones, just fall out of the rings. There's a lot of wood in this room. How come this has all survived? Well, it's due to the unusual preservation that we have here at the site. So it's oxygen-free, and that means that all the organic objects survive have here at the site. So it's oxygen free and that means that both

all the organic objects survive, so especially the wood. Here's a great example of everyday life, a wooden toilet seat. Now it's the only wooden toilet seat that has survived. There have been others that have been found but unfortunately they haven't survived and there it is. It's very utilitarian, it would serve its purpose and it was actually found reused as a plank to kind of shore up a building. So it's an unusual and interesting piece. And I think the popularity of it is because we all know and understand exactly what to do. So guys, thank you so much for welcoming me to Vindolanda. It's been as wonderful as I've always remembered it.

Everyone's got a chance coming here and in fact getting involved. Tell me more about that. Yeah, every year we welcome four or five hundred people to the excavations, to the research, museum volunteers, site guides, people, there are lots of different ways people can get involved and over the next four or five years there's a couple of thousand opportunities. You don't have to have any previous experience. If you're strong and healthy and you can push your own wheelbarrow then you can come and join the excavations if you're over 16. So there is no upper age limit, by the way, and you can come from any

part of the world. We teach you those basic skills so that you can learn to become an archaeologist if you wish, and actually be able to take part and find and discover your own little bit of history. That sounds ace. How do people do that? All you need to do is look at our website, vinterlander.com. All the information that you need is on there

or give us a call and we'll help you through the process. Also in one of the most beautiful parts of the world with lots of nice pubs nearby. So if you're listening to this abroad, definitely come and do it. Thank you very much, guys. Good luck for the plan. How many years ahead of seasons

have you actually got planned? We're always looking at the next five years, but to be honest, I say that sort of officially the next five years, but I've got a 10-year plan. And yeah, it's going to be a good 10 years. But don't wait another 10 years to come see me because, you know, you'll have too much catching up to do. So, you know, come back in the next few and see how it's going.

Certainly will. I'll bring the kids. Thanks, guys. One child, one teacher, one book. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free.

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