The Ancients - Vindolanda: Jewel of Roman Britain

Episode Date: June 27, 2021

Situated roughly two miles south of Hadrian's Wall in the heart of the Northumberland countryside, Vindolanda is home to some of the most remarkable archaeology from Roman Britain. Its history spans several centuries; it is a must see site for anyone wanting to know more about the ancient history of Britain. To learn more about Vindolanda, Tristan met up with Dr Andrew Birley, the Director of Excavations at Vindolanda.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, well, it's another special one because a few months back, I was fortunate enough to head north and visit Hadrian's Wall and visit several sites along Hadrian's Wall.

And during that journey, I went down a couple of miles south of the wall to visit one of the most remarkable ancient sites, not just in Britain, but in the whole of Europe, my humble opinion. This is Vindolanda, home of the famous Vindolanda tablets, but also an array of other incredible objects dating to the Roman period and indeed post-dating the Roman period. We're going into the early Middle Ages too. Now at the site I met up with the legend that is Dr Andrew Burley, head of excavations at Vindolanda, the head honcho. He's a brilliant speaker and he first of all showed me around the site of Vindolanda, the Roman forts and its occupation after the

Romans left and we then went into the Vindolanda Museum itself to have a look at some of the most incredible objects on display including some of their most recent discoveries in a Christian part of the site. So without further ado here's Andrew. So Andrew we're outside at Vindolanda itself. We are indeed, yep, we're at the site. And first of all, geographically, where is Vindolanda in regards to Hadrian's Wall? Well, it's part of Hadrian's Wall but in terms of the curtain wall, the big barrier, we're about a mile behind the curtain wall of Hadrian's Wall.

So the reason for that is we're on the original frontier highway, the frontier road, the Staingate Road, which was here 40, 50 years before Hadrian's Wall was built. So Finderland actually predates the construction of Hadrian's Wall? It wasn't even a twinkle in Hadrian's eye. In fact, Hadrian didn't exist when this place was put into action in about 85 AD. And why do we think it was built in around 85 AD? Well, the Romans are consolidating after they've been withdrawing from Northern Britain, what we call Scotland today, and they decide to use this narrow part of the country, which

is then reused for Hadrian's Wall, to put a road east-west across the landscape and to be able to move troops and supplies and hold down this territory. So, Vindolanda's part of that sort of line in the sand, the initial line in the sand, and part of the sort of conquest of this part of the country. So when we do see Hadrian coming here and we're looking at the original design of Hadrian's Wall with the mile castles and the turrets, this would have been one of the forts that was stationed just behind the wall? This is a construction fort for the wall, this is a garrison fort for the wall, and eventually of course the people who live here go up and build a new fort over there about a mile away, right onto the wall itself.

But because Vindolanda's in such a good spot, it just gets renewed again and again and again. They never abandon it. In fact, when Hadrian's Wall was mothballed briefly in the 140s, 150s and 160s to go up and build this newfangled turf thing, the Antonine Wall, Findlanda maintains an active presence. We have new forts, new populations, new garrisons. Despite the fact that most of Hadrian's Wall's mothballed and the troops are up serving well north of here, 100 miles further away, because it's in such an important spot. And that main road that was put here by the Romans when they first built the site is the main artery. It's the M1 or the M6 of the period taking troops and supplies east and west right across

the heart of the country. And you mentioned that longevity just there. I mean, because it seems there are several layers to this site, aren't there, over the centuries? Underneath where we're standing, believe it or not, and including that fort you see down there, the big wall in the distance, there are nine separate forts in this landscape. You have got seven metres of archaeology under our feet. And if this was in the Orient or on a river plateau or a flood plain, we would probably

call this a tell site, a mound of humanity. But because we are in the rolling hills of Northumberland, that mound became hidden. It's just another hill in many hills. So not until the 1970s did we really appreciate the fact there was so much archaeology here. And where are we walking now? Is this the road that you mentioned? Well we're walking down the High Street going into the, towards the gate of the fort. This is the main shopping precinct in the third century. The old Staingate Road actually links outside the north gate of the fort and comes in a straight line past the site, so we're on the side road going into the main fort itself. But it's on a bit of an angle this compared to the fort, and the reason for that is that

all this is is effectively a fossil of the early central roads inside the big forts. So what you're looking at there, about three and a half acres, the last fort of Vindolanda, is also one of the smallest. So most of the bases here are two or three times the size of that one we're going to enter. It's quite interesting how you said the latest of the forts at this size is also one of the smallest rather than one of the biggest. They get smaller.

They get smaller because you've got such a concentration of soldiers in the area. Once you've got Hadrian's Wall being constructed, you don't need those early massive bases that are here before the wall is built. You've got more of a dispersal going on. And also of course when you get into the fourth century the whole nature of the Roman army changes as well. You lose a lot of frontline soldiers and you get soldier farmers, border guards, frontiersmen, and you may only have a couple of frontline soldiers and you get soldier farmers, border guards, frontiersmen. And you may only have a couple of hundred of those rather than 600 soldiers in a base like that. And in regards to the latest archaeology, the latest sites, what times are we talking? How long after the Romans leave are we talking here?

You can go up to about 600 or 700 AD. So, you know, the end of Roman Britain, I mean, it's a bit of a controversial subject. I mean, was it 410? Was it 47? It's around there. Anyway, irrespective of that, this place transforms itself from being a Roman base, a Roman military establishment in the fourth century, into a British base in the fifth, sixth and seventh century. And eventually from military establishment into more of a religious base, a religious centre for the local community. And we see that when we get inside those walls and we look at the latest layers of archaeology and instead of finding barracks and other Roman buildings and houses we find churches, lots of churches built inside this

fort. Well let's go and have a look. Let's go and have a peek. This later Christian link to Vindolanda is absolutely astonishing to hear about. And Andrew next led me to this area of the site where they've been making these groundbreaking discoveries. So this is where we've been excavating. And you'll see lots of different things going on down here. First of all, the corner of this building down here is the edge of a scola, an officer's clubhouse. This is where soldiers who don't have traditional space

inside the fort to live, but are quite senior in rank, and their families would mess. They would live in there, they get their food in there, they get their laundry done in there. And if visitors come to the site from other forts, this is where they'd be housed when they were here for their visit and on top of that you can see another building cutting across and that's a fourth century storehouse with the barracks and the granaries on the other side now above this if we come a little bit further down and all the sort

of demolition of the end of Roman Britain higgledy-piggledy in its nature, lots of floors moving, lots of rubble collapsing. We get this telltale dark earth, which is so traditional on many sites across Britain at the end of the Roman period. And we used to think that meant that there was very little going on, but that's not true. We now understand that that dark earth represents lots of organic matter that's rotted in situ. And we've had a timber building cutting across our Roman remains where the dark earth is and that dark earth is the timber that's rotting in situ. And above that, the stone foundation curving around here, this curved wall of a fifth or

sixth century church. Now it's very badly built. It's a stone foundation for a timber superstructure. These people, their medium isn't stone, they build in timber, that's what they prefer to use. So they are literally just trying to raise the timbers out of the ground. And this building eventually, because it is poorly built, had collapsed in on itself and amongst the rubble inside the floor here, right in the middle of the building is where

we found that Christian chalice last year on the excavations. Sensational discovery. Now what happens next is all that grass over there Tristan, that's all going. Next year that's all going to disappear and you can see a little mound in front of the wheelbarrows there, in fact another mound where the wheelbarrows are as well and each of those mounds represents a building that's contemporary with the church.

I can't wait to see what we're going to find under there when we start excavating again next year. It could be very exciting. I mean, if it's anything like the finds you've found so far, it promises to be very exciting indeed. Well, watch this space and we'll see what happens, yeah. Excavations around the church, currently underway this summer, look set to reveal more stunning archaeology. But this Christian centre was not the only building of a religious nature that Andrew and his team have found within the fort itself. So of course for centuries before the arrival of Christianity on this site,

paganism at the site was prevalent. Yes, people expressed themselves any way they wished. They could pick any religion they wanted. There was no real state religion as such, although of course Jupiter Optimus Maximus was the head of the Roman pantheon. However wherever you travelled across the Roman Empire you'd pick things up and you'd worship local deities, you'd cover your bases basically. And of course as Roman soldiers move around so much in their communities they pick up all sorts of things and they bring

those things to Britain. And built into the northern ramparts of this fort is a temple dedicated to an eastern cult, a mystery cult. Now, unlike Mithras, this cult is really inclusive. Anybody can become a member. You don't just have to be male, you don't just have to be wealthy or part of the elite. Slaves can join this cult. And that makes it a little bit different to most of the other cults at the time that come from an eastern origin. But it shares some symbolism with Mithras and other places, as we'll see when we look at the altars inside the actual temple. So in 2009, this area was being excavated.

It was all under grass. You've got to imagine the grass turf coming across the top here. And we found a little drain in the corner of the fort wall and we thought great, we're going to find a new Roman toilet block in the corner of our fort, because up until that time nobody had ever found a temple inside the walls of an auxiliary fort, so it wasn't even on the list of things we thought could be possible, but as we continued to excavate across here we found a heated dining room, we thought well that's not really the sort of thing with the hypercoarse columns you're going to get in the toilet. I mean nice to have a heated toilet but not really sensible.

And as we crossed across this way we found the remains of a little edicula or a shrine and then the top of the first big altar sitting still in its original position outside the walls of the shrine. I mean this is absolutely extraordinary. One's saying this is also to an eastern god but also it's within the fort itself. It's within the fort itself and that can only be possible if it has the patronage of the commanding officer, somebody with high enough authority to say we are going to worship this god or goddess in this space.

What it also represents is the start of a new idea, a new way of thinking, to actually bring the power in heaven, if you want, or power in the heavens, and the power on earth, the commanding officer and the regiment, together. This is sort of a very medieval concept that you share the same space, that these two things rub together. And at Vindolanda, that's what's going on in the 3rd century. So here we've got the altar dedicated to the god. In this particular case, Jupiter Dol the altar dedicated to the god, in this particular case Jupiter Dolicanus, an eastern god who comes all the way from the Hittites and the Hurrians,

Hesham, so he's got a really long origin. He's standing on a bull, so very very similar to sort of Mithras and Mithraeans, and on the front the dedication reads to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, because everything has to be then worked into the Roman pantheon, Dolaceno for Dolacenus, and then the name of the dedicator, Sopichius Pudens, who is the prive commanding officer of the fourth cohort of Gauls who willingly and deservedly fulfilled his vow. So he was a good lad. The god gave up his part of the bargain, so Sopichius Pudens duly put the altar up to say thank you very much.

And then as soon as he's done that he can ask for something else because he's fulfilled his end of the contract. So great, now I can ask for my next favour from the god. What's good about this god is this god's in charge of the weather. He's a weather god and he's also associated with metal working and these are two of the main aspects which military communities have to deal with all the time. What's also fun about this particular god is that of course it also shows how isolated Britain can become from the rest of the empire in certain times. So in the 250s, Jupiter Dolucanus' main cult site in Duluk in Turkey was sacked by the Persians. So the rest of the Roman Empire started to give him up.

Well, he can't be that powerful because he can't even protect his own temple. But in Britain, we keep worshipping him for another hundred years. But of course, during this period, we start to be part of the breakaway empire, Corrosus Electus. We do our own thing with Gaul and Spain for a while. And either the news doesn't get through that the main cult site's sacked, or we just don't care. And we like to keep worshipping the old guy for a little bit longer.

And sorry, what is he actually holding in his hands? So he's got an axe in one hand, and this is part of his sort of metalworking and striking things down, and then lightning bolts in the other. So, you know, that sort of classical Jupiter lightning bolts and axe. So, you know, that sort of classical Jupiter, lightning bolts and axe. But of course, these particular symbols can be found all the way back through Hyrrian and Hittite representations of this god in his earlier form, which is absolutely terrific. Absolutely. Well, I'll leave a votive offering here for good weather for the days. Please do. We really need it for the next couple of months. That'd be great.

From the site on top of the hill, Andrew and I headed down to the Vindolanda Museum, where many of the objects discovered during excavations are put on display. So, Andrew, we've just walked inside. Where are we now? Well, we're in one of the first main galleries of Vindolanda, and this is our sort of wall of shoes from the site here. I know we've got some fantastic footwear on display from all different typesau o strata cymdeithasol, pob math o ddynion, dynion, siwes plant. Ac mae'r cwmpas yn un o'r casau mwyaf emotiwol oherwydd mae'n gwneud cysylltiad yn gyflym i'r rhan fwyaf o'n ymweldwyr sy'n dod i'r lleoliad, i Vindolanda. Oherwydd rydyn ni i gyd yn

gwneud siwes, neu mae'r rhan fwyaf ohonom yn gwneud siwes, ac felly mae'n rhywbeth y gallwch ei gyfathrebu'n syth ac ymgysylltu â'i gilydd. Ond y peth mwyaf hyn am y cwmpas hyn yw and so it's something that you can straightaway rationalize and connect with. But the fun thing about these items is that of course they represent very often people who are hidden otherwise archaeologically. So particularly the women and children's shoes because everybody uses the same stuff but because we're anatomically different and of course different age groups have different sizes of footwear it shows us where people of different types groups have different sizes of footwear. It shows us where people of different types were in different spaces which would otherwise be, as I say, invisible to the naked eye or to the archaeological record, particularly children. So we find lots of these

children's shoes which are really sweet, very cute things, inside military barracks, inside those spaces. And that's helped us to disprove the argument that Roman forts were just the male preserve. They were just a male environment. Because if you've got these kids running around, that clearly isn't the case. It's absolutely astonishing. It feels like a double whammy here. It's not only that it's organic material that survived, as you said, it's also revealing sometimes the hidden aspects of the fort with the women and the children. That's right. I mean, and you know, you think about it, you think of Hadrian's Wall, the Roman army, lots of big, hairy Roman soldiers

running around the countryside doing this stuff. But they were really just the tip of the spear. And if you then add in the footwear as a representation of the rest of the community, you realise that, you know, it was much bigger than that tip of the spear and that that military community was a really impressive thing. And why do so many pieces of organic material survive at Vindolanda? We've got this fantastic anaerobic conditions, oxygen-free, there's very little air under the ground, and without the oxygen, bacteria can't break things down, doesn't have the energy to mush stuff up and turn it into soil. So if you bury an item of footwear or something that's made of wood or something like that from the site,

and there's some more cracking examples over here, if you bury these things under the ground, like this little children's shoe here, or this little child's shoe, it should come out of the soil in the same condition it was put in 2000 years ago. Now, if it was a really rotten, horrible thing, it's not gonna be improved

by being under the ground for 2000 years, but it'll be really rotten, horrible thing, it's not going to be improved by being under the ground for 2,000 years. But it'll be close to the preservation level, if not exactly as it was 2,000 years ago, if it's rapidly sealed. And that's the beauty of this site. Buried under rich Northumberland soil, deep down sometimes, six or seven meters down, you get all of this stuff surviving. Once again, just before we go on, I absolutely love the detail about surviving with the patterns either at

the bottom of the shoe or on the sides of the shoes themselves. There's some real designer footwear items here you know this isn't just make do this isn't just sort of you know cheap stuff I mean over here we've got a lady's slipper we call it the lepadina slipper and it's it's a fashion item that's coming from the continent so you know this is an fashion item that's coming from the continent. So, you know, this is an expensive item that's come to the frontier. Although they're on the edge of the empire, it doesn't stop them looking great, you know,

having the latest fashions, the latest trends. And, of course, we can pick that up too. So we see four centuries of fashion. We see, you know, the Winkle Picker coming in and going out and the Closed Boot coming in and going out and in, and how people would have changed their style. The one thing that doesn't survive, unfortunately, because in the anaerobic soil, the colour, the pigments disappear from the leather. And one of the things we'll be looking forward to doing in the next few years is analysing

some of this leather from the shoes and trying to pick out the colours and the pigments that were once in that those items of footwear so they look very black or very brown now but in actual fact leather shoes from places like Egypt show us that and some of them were incredibly colorful and quite gorgeous and quite high design so fingers crossed we'll to pull that information out now this little display here represents a fraction of the number of shoes that have come from the site. So we have over five and a half thousand items of footwear and possibly over a hundred thousand left to find. Really? Wow. I mean why do you think they decided to leave all of these shoes here? Roman army, really mobile.

But if you're in this space for five or ten years, you know yourself, if you go to move house or even move bedroom, you think, right, I've got to move all this stuff somewhere else. And you just, where did all of this come from? How much stuff have I actually got? And the Roman army are the same. So they can only carry what they can carry on their backs or a mule when they go to their

next posting. And if they've just been gathering stuff and buying extra things for themselves, then they've got a really hard choice to make. Do I take it with me or do I just dump it? And a lot of stuff, they've got to dump. They've got to get rid of it. I could ask questions about this for hours, but let's move on. So as we go through the museum here, we've got lots of different items.

Of course, we're a military site, so you get a lot of evidence for war, military activity. And so you've got ballista bolts, spears, practice swords made of wood, slingshots, a little sling pouch there, and of course victims of the conflict as well. And this young man here has had his head cut off and mounted on a pole on the ramparts of Vindolanda in the Severan period, so the beginning of the third century, and you can see that the battle damage he's taken to his skull. So he's had this side caved in with a blunt instrument and this side here has been hit either with a sword or a spear and it's sliced the edge of his skull out. So he's been in quite a state. And it just reminds us that although we've got all the women and children here in a mixed community,

the purpose of the Roman army being here is very much war and to suppress the local population. I mean, once, and I was looking at the wooden sword again, organic material, and it's a training sword. So once again, hidden aspect, even at the military side. Well, that's right. And you look at stuff like that, and it's tempting almost to think of them as toys almost like a toy sword that you might have

had as a child. I certainly had little toy swords. I remember my dad making me a toy sword. I was well chuffed and I could sort of hit my sister with it or you know hit her toy sword and maybe occasionally hit my sister with it. But these sorts of things here, yeah training, practice, it's absolutely essential and of, they give toy swords to their kids as well, because if you're a young boy growing up in this military community, the natural aspiration for you from your parents would be to join the regiment, to become another member of the army. From swords to artillery bolts to javelin heads, it's no surprise that so much remarkable weaponry has been uncovered from Vindolanda. But alongside

arms, Andrew and his team have also unearthed some extraordinary armour. Well, yeah, talking about arms and armour, I mean, my eyes were instantly taken to this. To this? Horse armour. Yeah, the chamfering. Now, we think of the soldiers being very decorative, but of course, you know, the cavalry is hugely blingy too. And this is probably the sort of headdress they would wear whilst on parade or doing manoeuvre. But of course, the horses have to be armoured as well as the men so they can survive in this environment. And part of the process of the Roman army in terms of its image and its projection of power is to be very blingy, be very in your face, you know,

almost sort of like the red coats in the sense that you could see them coming over the hillside from miles and miles away and so not just the soldiers but the horses would also just shine and shimmer in the light because of all of the bronze and the copper alloy which is attached to their armor so this headdress is rather lovely but if you come around the corner you can see even the basic stuff all the trimmings and the harness belts and buckles, they're all really shiny too. So you can just imagine this very bright dazzling force coming over the hills and very noisy because all this stuff clanks and clinks.

So a little bit like a Stuka in World War II dive bombing down and creating that fear. You could hear a Roman army and see a Roman army from a long way away. Yeah, it must have been designed to impress. If you're looking over there, you're a small war band approaching the wall or whatever, you see it shining in the sun. But as I said, also you can hear it coming too. You can hear it coming, you think, oh no, you know, time to run and hide. Yes, we've been spotted.

So swords survive in the soil too, other bits and bobs, more leather, but what I really want to show you is right in front of us here. So every now and then we get something which is beyond the realms of what we expect to ever find. It's not even on an archaeologist's dream shopping list. And what we've got here are two examples of that. So we've got boxing gloves from some of our earliest periods from a cavalry barrack from actually Varduli soldiers from northern Spain. They're just sitting on the barrack floor.

Two different types of glove, a practice glove which is very softly padded with leather and then the glove below has a hardened leather trim on the edge, fire hardened and it was packed with straw when we found it and that's used to obviously the straw to protect the knuckle but also to slice the opponent to make them bleed. So a practice glove and a bout glove. And what I love about this is sort of multi-faceted nature, how it helps to understand training, unarmed combat, in terms of there's no sword here, so fitness, and of course, sport, and then entertainment. This represents all those things.

And of course, Roman soldiers would be betting on boxing matches. They'd have their favorite heroes who are boxing champions. You'd have inter-unit rivalry. You'd have your Varduli taking on your local champion down the road. And it just shows a different aspect of life entirely to work, work, work that you imagine when you think of a Roman army. Absolutely.

So we can imagine almost 2000 years ago, Spanish soldiers serving in the Roman army when they're not on patrol or whatever. They're at a boxing match or they're watching a boxing game and here are the gloves. Here's the evidence. And these are the only surviving boxing gloves from the Roman Empire, and the earliest surviving boxing gloves for over 1,600 years. That is a real treasure, in the whole of the Roman Empire. In the whole of the Roman world, yeah.

And, you know, we have evidence for these gloves on sculpture. We have evidence on wall paintings. Mae gennym ddiwedd ar ysgolion, mae gennym ddiwedd ar ddylunio'r dynion, mae gennym bosai yn dangos bwysau, yn enwedig yn Ostia, mae'n bosai gwych, ond nid yw'n bosai wedi gallu cael y bosai. Ac gyda pob ddysgwyr fel hyn, yr hyn y gobeithio yw ei fod yn allu mwy, er bod gennym bosai bosai bosai bosai bosai bosai bosai bosai bosai bosai bosai bosai bosai bosai bosai bosai more that even because we've got a complete glove here or two if somebody's got a fraction of a glove somewhere else and they've never been able to recognize or understand where that's from or what it is these artifacts will be able to

you know unlock where this activity is taking place in more spaces so fingers crossed yeah that's what will happen these boxing gloves are absolutely remarkable and it's worth repeating that these boxing gloves are the only ones that have ever been discovered from anywhere in the Roman Empire. And they're on display at the Vindolanda Museum. But don't worry, there's still plenty more to see. What caused the anarchy? How did medieval migrants shape the language I'm speaking right now? Who won the Hundred Years' War?

Could England's lost patron saint be buried under a tennis court in Suffolk? How did England's last medieval king end up under a car park? And were the Dark Ages really all that dark? I'm Dr Kat Jarman. And I'm Matt Lewis. On Gone Medieval, we'll uncover the most exciting and unexpected stories about the Middle Ages, hearing from the best and brightest minds. We will disentangle fact from fiction, bring you the latest discoveries, and reveal how the so-called Dark Ages laid the foundations for much of the world we're living in today. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. So fine dining, again, we're at the edge of the empire.

This stuff is wonderful because it was found in the bottom of our very first Ford Ditch and it's exactly the same batch of Samian pottery, Teresi Galata, that was found at Pompeii, that was delivered from the groveless act named Malou in the south of France. So that stuff arrived in Pompeii, AD 79. This stuff took another six years to get to the northern frontier of Roman Britain in AD 85.

But it arrived broken. so all of the vessels were smashed or chipped en route and when they unpacked the crate they just thought, you know what, this is hopeless, and they just threw it into the ditch. And so the pottery and the crate survived for us to excavate about 20 years ago. So great, it tells us about trade, tells us about how long it takes stuff to get here and it also shows that they can get the best stuff right up here on the edge of Roman Britain. I guess it can also show intention doesn't it among the higher echelons at Vindolanda, they want that sense of home, they want that sense of the Mediterranean don't they? Absolutely, yeah, yeah and

there's nothing they can't get their hands on. You know this is the thing, we tend to think of Britain as the edge of the Roman Empire on a limb. But as far as the people living here are concerned, it's completely connected to everything else. They can get whatever they need. They might have to wait for it, but they can get it. They will get it. They will get it. Interconnected nature of it, isn't it? It is.

More kitchen utensils, pottery, perfume bottles. Perfume, yes. Yeah, absolutely vital for sweaty, smelly Roman soldiers and their families living in some interesting living conditions. Oyster shells, little spoons here. Now, the spoons are interesting because you can see quite a lot of them have got burnt holes in the middle of them, like this one here. And we know that they're getting opium to the site of Indolandra as well. And we found actually little pots with opium seeds in them. So it's entirely possible that what you're looking at here is people using the opium in some cases, and burning it on the spoons.

It would originally be for medicinal purposes for sure, but of course if you're treated with it for long enough you get an addiction and then suddenly you need your supply. And so all the different aspects of life, things which we think of as very modern parts of our society, sometimes parts we don't want to face up to, are here 2,000 years ago in Roman Britain. And where would they get the opium from in the Empire? They're getting it mainly from Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean and it's all being shipped in from there. But of course they're also getting other spices and the pepper is coming from that part of the world or even further away and it's all being shipped through on this military conveyor belt of food and supplies. It would have been very expensive but you could get your hands

on it. Absolutely. Yeah. Now the pottery is so useful to us because certain waves of pottery come to Hadrian's Wall which really help us to date the site. So this stuff here, carinated bowls with reeded rims, the sort of flat rims, is all pre-Hadrianic. This stuff comes up to us before Hadrian's Wall is being built. But when you get the black burnish wares coming in, the darker vessels with a crisscross pattern, that's the construction period of Hadrian's Wall onward. And what you're looking at are certain massive

manufactories, certain areas getting military contracts. And so sometimes they get them, sometimes they don't. And this changes the nature of what people can use on the frontier quite dramatically. So, for instance, the Samian here all kind of disappears in the 3rd century because the potters backed the wrong side in the Civil War. And the penalty for that was losing the military contract. And that is literally millions of pots a year that they can't supply to the Roman army. And just for backing a wrong... They back the wrong side of the civil war, they go bust, puts them out of business.

It's amazing how it can basically go out of business so quickly. Yeah, just boom, instant. Overnight, you back the wrong side, you play your politics poorly, you lose the military contract. And that has an immediate effect on the whole global supply chain. As we walk around the museum, Andrew and I also look at other items on display such as coins, textiles, jewellery and animal bones. The museum is full of incredible archaeology but there is one set of objects that have rightfully gained celebrity status, the creme de la creme de la collection. Sir Tristan, the piece de resistance, the most important thing. In a museum full of treasures, this feels like this is one of these star attractions.

This is a vault. And I'm just going to close the door for a second so we're not disturbed because this space here holds our top treasure. And what we're looking at here are the writing tablets, the Roman letters, the Roman documents that survived from the site. Postcards from the past. Postcards from the past. Postcards from the past, yeah. And you can see they're actually quite hard to read and actually with the naked eye this looks completely blank. It's not completely blank, it's actually covered in

ink handwriting and used an ink pen to do it and actually this letter here is the letter by our first commanding officer the founder of Vindolanda in his own handwriting a guy called Julius Veracundus so it's really really important and to tease that writing back we have to use infrared photography because it picks up the carbon on the ink and just allows it to come back so we can read it. Other things a bit easier. This one here, you can probably see the writing there a little bit more easily. It's a lighter wood. And we've got a letter here from a guy called Masculus writing, or Masculus writing to Veracundus.

Veracundo, and he says, suo salutum. How you doing? On the top line. And this is a letter coming to this man, our commander, from a cavalry detachment commander who's got some troops from Veracundus' regiment based at Vindolanda. And he's basically saying, can I give them a holiday? Are they all right to have some leave? And then he has a few anecdotal bits and bobs. Other letters just give us such a rich idea of what's going on. So we've got transactions up here between the commanding officer and a slave. And down here we've got, well, how do I

describe this? We've got basically a conflict at work going on. So a centurion is misbehaving, who Veracundus is in charge of, and heeth, ac mae'n seiliedig ar rywle arall. Ac mae gweithwyr o ran uchel yn ymdrin am ei ffordd, yn dweud, dyma ni, nid yw'n gwerthfawr, mae'n golygu problemau, mae'n rhaid i ni ddweud wrthych chi beth ydym yn mynd i'w wneud amdano. Felly mae gennym ni ychydig o wneud o'r ffrindiau diwylliannol yn cymryd ei gynnal. Ac mae'r materion hyn yn ddynol iawn sy'n dod allan o'r ffrindir. of an industrial dispute taking place. And these are very modern issues which are coming out from the frontier. And so this commanding officer is having to deal with the sort of stuff that any office manager or captain of industry or supervisor would have to do in any modern firm

environment, whether it's a supermarket or a manufacturing place, whatever, or the army, let's be honest. And that humanising effect of the letters, the fact that they give us little windows into the souls and the aspirations of the people, can't be beaten by any of the other artefacts in this building. It's hilarious that these are almost 2,000 years old, and things we don't normally hear about in ancient sources, like senior management, like the day-to-day tasks and the issues that a commander would have to deal with in the army. It gives us an insight into that. This is probably why Julius Vericundus, I would imagine, lost his hair in his thirties,

you know, having to deal with issues like this. Oh, not that bloke again. And I'm moving him around trying to sort him out. But this is the power of the writing tablets. And we've got about 15 or 16 on display here. There are around about 2,000 that have come from the site. More will come from Vindolanda, but also other places in Roman Britain. And the rest are on display or in storage in the British Museum. But because of their power to give us history unfiltered, direct from the mouths of the people who are living through it, that is incomparable in terms of a resource. It's so precious, isn't it? It really is. So they don't look like much, but by God,

they're powerful stuff. I can imagine, really imagine. And is it just military stuff that we hear about in these tablets, or is there so much more? Oh, so much more. I mean, basically, if you live at Vindolanda and you want to contribute properly to this community, you have to be literate. So no matter what your rank, your status. I mean, this letter over here is Julius Vericundus is writing to a slave. And he's complaining to the slave because the slave has sent some stuff up. He sent a magic box to Vindolanda and all sorts of other bits and bobs and supplies.

He hasn't sent the key. So he can't get in the magic box. So he's having a real go at him, saying, oh, you know, get yourself sorted out. So the slave is obviously very literate. And a lot of them were. Women and children, we have evidence of writing lessons at this site. We have a fragment of a letter, Virgil's Georgics, which was found in a centurion's toilet drain. So you can see what he was reading instead of a newspaper, bettering himself. There's also a wasp's nest down there, perhaps why he dropped it.

So they do really reflect all parts of society. And what's lovely, Tristan, is that we're not dealing with kings and queens, the governors of Roman Britain, or emperors or emperors. You know, we're not dealing with the people who made those massive decisions. These are people who are living their daily lives 2,000 years ago. Absolutely, Andrew. And you mentioned women and children earlier, and we saw with the shoes earlier as well, but that other hidden aspect sometimes we see of Roman life, that infamous aspect, the slaves, we're also learning more about the slaves from these tablets, that's brilliant. We are, and you're quite right, I mean, if it wasn't for the tablets, they're completely hidden. I mean, how many of those shoes that we looked at earlier were owned

by slaves? Impossible to say, but at least here, through the tablets on display at the site and at the British Museum, those people have a voice and we've started to learn a bit more about them, which is fantastic. Now what other examples do we have here? Well we've got people talking about shoes, which is very appropriate because it's standard. We've got people talking about the social mess, the Scholar, the officers' clubhouse, and we were just working on one of those up on site at the moment.

So that's really good fun. And this is where all people who don't have a certain rank, who don't have a traditional house inside the Fort Hall community live. So they pay a little bit of a fee. So your bath house steward, your vet, your doctor, your quartermaster, your standard bearer can all live in the scholar and with their families but also if you're a visiting dignitary that's where

you stay you stay in this mini hotel inside the fort we've got this lovely little fragment of a letter of a man who's been deported from the province in chains which is rather good fun so you're getting a little bit of law and So you're getting a little bit of law and order, you're getting a little bit of consequences for your action, crime and punishment, and then of course we've got little fractions of reports, intelligence reports coming into the unit and the regiment from other commanders and other officers saying, oh this is what's going on here, this is what's going on there. But if we around the corner one of my favorites and there are lots of favorites is this one here. Now it doesn't look much but it's actually a part of an account found in one of the

Barrick rooms and you can just see how they really squeeze the detail here and it's all sorts of stuff that they're buying in. Now what's fun about tablets like this because they're effectively accounts is they tell you the value or the price of things. So you know I told you earlier that you can buy a horse in the land of a two and a half denarii. How do I know this? Because somebody was buying a horse for two and a half denarii. Now what I can't tell you is was it a pony or was it a stallion i don't know was it a five-year-old horse or a 15 year old horse but we do know at least you can buy a horse for two and a half denarii

and again there's no other way you can get that information uh so cross-referencing that with the coins we saw earlier when you said it cost two and a half to nine hours how do we know it costs that much because the writing tablets they tell us how much it costs to buy a horse and to buy a spear and to buy peacock feathers and 250 eggs and one could go on and so again how how else can we find we can find roman coins on many many sites they're all over roman britain but if i were to ask you what can you buy with it They're all over Roman Britain. But if I were to ask you, well, what can you buy with it? It's a much more difficult question, isn't it? But the tablets tell us some of that information.

And so we're starting to build our shopping lists from Roman Britain. We're starting to work out really how our economy works. We know now that, thanks to letters like this or lists, the smallest coin you've got in your pocket, an ass, the Roman one penny can buy you at Vindolanda five gallons of beer. That's one heck of a night you're going to have with five gallons of beer. In fact, I challenge anybody to get through five gallons of beer. I don't actually, because it's a very irresponsible thing to do. So you've got

all this sort of stuff and from different spaces within the community, both inside, outside the fort, different ranks, different social spaces people are talking about. And it's that detail which comes through. Andrew, once again, just how unusual is it to find tablets like these? It's very, very rare. It's partly because the conditions are rare, where they survive. But it's also partly down to the fact that to be able to recover them, you've got to have the time and the space to do it. So, so much of UK archaeology now is commercial archaeology, where you're excavating and you're on a building site and, you know, two hours later they're pouring concrete in behind you.

That's not the environment in which these things can be easily found. And you can't find them with a trowel because they're so sensitive. And when they sit in the ground, if I explain this, they look like little bits of twigs or if they're up like this in heather, straw and bracken, it'll just look like a twig. If you're troweling, you take out the twigs and you take out this twig, that twig never moves, it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller. It's a twig yn symud, mae'n dod yn fwy a fwy. Mae'r tablet ysgrifennu yn cael ei droi'n ffwrdd. Os mae'n sefydlu'n ymlaen ac mae'r text yn ei ffwrdd, oherwydd bod troi'n gweithredu,

wrth i chi droi'n ffwrdd, efallai y byddwch chi'n ffodus i weld y sgrifennu cyn troi'r sgrifennu yn ffwrdd. Felly pan fyddwn ni'n ei ddod o hyd i'r twigau, rydyn ni'n defnyddio spade, rydyn ni'n cymryd y tablet a'r materion sydd ynddynt yn blociau, ac yna, yn ddynol, gyda'n ddau dyn, rydyn ni'n ymgysylltu â phwysigrwydd. We use spades, we take the tablets and the material that they're in out in blocks, and then very gently with our hands, our bare hands, we just apply pressure. And as we do that, because they're smooth in relation to the material they're in,

the soil breaks and you can recover them and read them. But that goes against the grain of traditional archaeological methodology because of the tools that we're taught to use. So it's a hard thing to do. They do come from some other sites. How many have been lost? It keeps me awake at night. But I think that the beauty of this is now that we know how to find them, more will absolutely come from Roman Britain. And the more that comes from Roman Britain, the closer we get to those people who lived here 2,000 years ago. Absolutely. And in Vindolando in particular, I'm guessing we can expect many more, hopefully

in the future. In the next two years, watch this space, because I think we'll have quite a few more coming out of the ground. Very excited. Very excited indeed. And finally, last but certainly not least, the Vindolanda Museum's newest addition. OK, Tristan, so through here, we've a new gallery, just opened up this year, and it highlights a really important part of the story, because the end of Roman Britain, the end of Roman Vindolanda, is not the end of Vindolanda. It's the half-life of Vindolanda.

So for at least another 300 or 400 years, people lived here, and this is the evidence of what happened next. I'm very excited, really excited to see this. So what happened next? Well, we get soldiers and their families still living here, and the site morphs into a Christian community, and that becomes the focus of activity at this place. And we get churches being built here, we get homes, and people live here for another 300 or 400 years,

and they leave evidence of that behind. And the most important thing that they've left behind so far, and of course the excavations are ongoing, is this in this special case here. What we've got here is a lead vessel, a chalice, found inside the walls of a Christian church. And it's very hard to see because it's very fragile, but each of these little fragments is incised with Christian symbols from the people living in the community at that time. And the combination of those symbols is astounding, absolutely astounding. a little Holy Ghost, kairos, crosses, wheat or corn, angels, the congregation, a little smiling priestly figure who could represent Psalm 21. It's all crammed inside and out onto the fragments of this lead vessel. And it's the only chalice to survive from this period from Western Europe.

Western Europe? Yeah. Yeah. This sort of Christian graffiti appears on fragments of stone. It appears on some wall paintings in Caesarea. Some of it, not as much as on this vessel, but never on a portable artifact like this before, up until this point, has it been found. So

it doesn't look much, a little bit like the writing tablets, don't look much, but in terms of what it can unlock about the tale of Christianity in Britain and the north of Britain in this period, at the moment it's unparalleled. I mean we've just seen with the writing tablets how there seems to be lots of writing crammed in to parts of the tablets. And it seems on this chalice too, can we call it early Christian graffiti crammed into the outside of this chalice? They've created on this vessel, they've turned it into a holy relic. And there is some debate about how this would have been used. When we look at Christian communities and how they practice their faith, their religion,

all our examples really come from the Levant or other parts of the Roman Empire or what was the Roman Empire. We don't really have that narrative for the north of Britain. This might help us understand that a little bit more. So the research is at the early days yet, but as it continues in the next couple of months and over the next year or so, we really do hope this is going to be the key to unlock a lot more about that period of history, what used to be referred to as the Dark Age of Britain, not just for Vindolanda but for right across the north of England. You know, Vindolanda leading the way, not just in Roman archaeology but also what happens next, and this seems like an extraordinary new groundbreaking archaeological find.

How was it found? It was found by one of our volunteers. We have about four or five hundred volunteers who come and join us every year. They come for two weeks on the excavations. This particular lady, Leslie, had come all the way from Kangaroo Island in Australia. So she'd made a heck of a journey, a heck of a pilgrimage of her own to come and work on the site. And it was her first ever archaeological experience is working away in the ground inside the

church pulling back the dark earth and mud under some fallen rubble and she just found the top piece of the large part of the vessel and straightaway could see the symbol starting to appear we thought we knew right then oh wow because of the late nature of where it was sitting in the ground because of the material was made out of because it was sitting in the ground, because of the material it was made out of, because it was in what we thought was a church, a curved building with an apse, that this was going to be a really significant find.

That's a hell of a way to start your archaeological career. Well, how do you top it? I mean, she might retire at this point. I don't know, because I'm not sure she can beat it. But hopefully Lesley will be able to come back and join us in the future. And if she strikes twice... Magic touch. Well, exactly. I might have to give her a job.

Just quickly on the symbols themselves, you mentioned there seems to be a variety of Christian symbols, but the ships seem really interesting to me. I know it's not always that far from the coast wherever you are in Britain, but Vindolanda seems to be one of the furthest places you could be from the coast in Britain and yet there seems to still be all these naval symbols. Well we are a bit landlocked for sure, but of course what this represents is our connectivity to the rest of the Christian religion, the rest of the empire in that sense as it was, and that connectivity represented by the ships and the whales, but of course these are also biblical tales, you know, Jonah and the whale and the ships and all this sort of stuff and the voyages that some of the early Christian saints took. They're all telling stories like the Samian potteries tell

the stories of ancient Roman and Greek parables and tales. This vessel's doing the same thing but for a new Christian community. So there are lots of reference points in here. I mean obviously the fish feeding with bread and fish and loaves and fishes on the lake and all this sort of stuff. It all ties together to that narrative. When you don't have a Bible you don't have this big textbook you can take around. And with that in mind if we come around the corner here we can see what you'd use instead of a Bible. This lovely little worn stone here is a portable Christian altar. And this would be carried by the priest

and used during his sermons, but also taken with him to go out and meet the congregation where they live, out in the community, out in the countryside, around the site. And so what you've got on here is you've got a traditional cross and then you've got a Cairo.

Now this dates, the combination of those two things dates this to somewhere between 450 and 550 AD. It's that transition between the Cairo and the cross coming in. And of course, you know, it's just such a wonderful thing to find. You can see how smooth the stone is worn by people touching it and using it. And that's always a lovely thing too. This little thing next door is also remarkable. It's the most northerly type of Christian iconography on this sort of implement that's ever been found. It's a nail cleaning strap end and you can see here on the little drawing we have a happy Christian figure with a crook little halo going around the top of his head. And what I think I really like about the Christian depictions in this period is they're all so cheerful. We don't always associate the practice of Christianity,

because sometimes in certain settings can be very formal, with joy in every sense and cheerfulness. But for the people of Llander and the people in early Christian post-Roman Britain, it was a celebration. It was an uplifting, cheerful thing, a happy experience. And that's expressed not just on the chalice, but also on the iconography of little artefacts like this. Yeah, it's a really small artefact. I'm just looking in there because you can see the intricate detail of it. It's really astonishing. And again, it's copper alloy. So that would shine, it's been found quite high up in the levels, but that would shine like gold when it was being used. It would be very blingy, a very decorative, a very in-your-face,

I'm Christian and I'm proud sort of thing to exhibit that, to wear it. I guess it emphasizes how following the Romans, well after they leave, how the Christian church becomes this center of society, doesn't it? It does, and it's the bond, it's the glue that holds everything together. And of course, it also perpetuates and continues Latin as the lingua franca. It uses Latin as the language to hold everything together, to bond it. And that helps the congregation too, because they're operating and living in a landscape which is festooned with Latin. It's everywhere. Every mile has a milestone with a Latin inscription on it. Buildings,

gateways, cemeteries, major monuments, covered, smothered in Latin, sometimes formal, sometimes graffiti. So the people living in the 5th and 6th centuries, not just in Vindolanda, but in Roman Britain, would have been able to recognise at least quite a lot of that to be able to navigate those spaces and understand the meaning of what those things said. Now, looking at all these Christian aspects, I've also seen something which you wouldn't immediately associate with the Christian religion, but you do see them around Hadrian's Wall, a lead phallus. Good luck, charms. Yeah. Well, in this transition period, people are finding their feet. And we all know that Christianity borrows a lot of things from other religions. And of course, a lot of religions borrow things from other

religions, whether it's particular festivals, times of day, the way they commemorate things. But good luck charms like this, or fertility symbols, you know, they just remain in use quite comfortably all the way through this period. And people are hedging their bets. quite comfortably all the way through this period and people are hedging their bets. You might be Christian but are you sure that not having something like this will help? And of course Christians of course, because they're Christian doesn't necessarily mean they're not superstitious or they don't give a voting or an offering, they don't pray as an example. And so of course they do. So things like this represent again that transition from one thing to another and how people are hedging their bets a little bit as they live their daily lives. Once again that idea of transition. And as you say, Vindolanda not only predates Hadrian's Wall, it also outlives the Roman occupation as well. It does, it does. And hopefully, you know, when we work on more

sites, we'll find that Vindolanda is not the exception to the rule, but it's actually more in keeping with what's going on elsewhere. It's just the fact that we've done so much work here that we're able to give this sort of detail to the stories that we can tell. I hope you enjoyed this walking tour with the fantastic Dr. Andrew Burley. If you want to see more about Vindolanda, well, this walking tour we did as a documentary. It is on History Hit TV as part of our Hadrian's Wall series.

Simply search for Edges of Empire, Hadrian's Wall, or Vindolanda, Jewel of the North. See you in the next episode, folks. We'll see you next time. program. They've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.