The Ancients - Vindolanda's 2021 Excavation

Episode Date: November 28, 2021

Situated roughly one mile south of Hadrian’s Wall is one of the great jewels of Roman and early medieval archaeology: Vindolanda. Over the past 50 years, annual excavations at this site have revealed incredible amounts of new information. Information that has not only shone more light on the site’s history, but also on the minutiae of everyday life for those people who lived on this north western frontier of the Roman Empire almost 2,000 years. A plethora of stunning artefacts have been unearthed over the last half decade from Vindolanda: from the only Roman boxing gloves found from anywhere in the Roman Empire to early medieval Christian graffiti. What’s most exciting of all, however, is that there are still so many more exciting finds to be uncovered in the years ahead. In this episode we return to Northumberland to speak to Dr Andrew Birley and Marta Alberti who, alongside their team of archaeologists and volunteers, are constantly discovering more about the people who lived and passed through the site. They describe their findings from 2021, including more information about the other animals at Vindolanda and the post-Roman uses of the fortifications. We also get a glimpse of what we can expect from next year’s work.If you’re enjoying this podcast and looking for more fascinating Ancients content then subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here.

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Now, this episode, we've curated it from a new documentary that we've made for History Hit TV, all about the 2021 excavation. And so in this episode, we feature two of the leading archaeologists at Vindolanda, episode we feature two of the leading archaeologists at Vindolanda, Dr Andrew Burley, the head of excavations, and Marta Alberti, the site archaeologist. And in this podcast Marta and Andrew, they guide you through the 2021 excavation week by week, structure by structure. They explain what areas they excavated, what time periods these areas date to, and of course, most important of all, what remarkable artefacts they've discovered this year. Now this is a very, very special Ancients episode. Our chief editor Sophie, she's put in a lot of hours to get this podcast ready for release, so huge kudos to Sophie on that. And without further ado, to talk all about

Vindolanda's 2021 excavation season here's Andrew and here's Marta. Vindolanda is one of the great jewels of Roman Britain. The site is situated roughly one mile south of the historic landmark that is Hadrian's Wall. Dr Andrew Burley is the Director of Excavations at Vindolanda and here he explains what Vindolanda is. Well Vindolanda in essence is a fort and military community on the edge of the Roman Empire situated in the beautiful rolling landscape of Northumberland. It's a time capsule where so much has been left behind by so many people, still in position over 2,000 years ago, that we can learn about the detail and minutiae of daily

life in a way that you can't really do from many other places. A key method for learning more about Vindolanda's long-stretching history is excavation. Marta Alberti is the Vindolanda Trust's site archaeologist and one of the leading figures in the 2021 excavation. Excavation at Vindolanda is key to understanding more about not only the site itself, but its wider connections to Hadrian's Wall. While there are non-intrusive methods such as resistivity, magnetometry, GPR that can be employed to investigate the presence of structures in the area. The solution to finding out who lived in these structures and what were the purposes of these structures and even what's the chronological order that all these structures went up one on top of the other is truly excavation. Without excavation at Vindolanda

we wouldn't be able to further our research agenda. So excavations have been goingvation at Vindolanda we wouldn't be able to further our research agenda. So excavations have been going on at Vindolanda for about 51 years now, over 50 years in terms of continuously. And through that time we've transformed our knowledge of Roman Britain as well as Vindolanda and different periods of occupation. But the thing about this site is it's huge, it's massive and it's only one part of the much larger monument and landscape of Hadrian's Wall in Roman Britain. So it shows us some of the challenges that lie ahead. And also it's been a great testbed for different techniques

and the development of archaeology through that 50-year time period. Like any other profession, like surgery or anything else, things, techniques develop over time, and we've seen a lot of those happen at Vindolanda over the last 50 years. From Roman boxing gloves to early Christian graffiti, lots of stunning and diverse artefacts have been unearthed at Vindolanda over the past 50 years. Most extraordinary of all, however, are the writing tablets, preserved within the lower-down, oxygen-reduced, waterlogged anaerobic soil layers that the site is famous for.

They are tiny sheets of wood the size of a postcard and the consistency of wet paper as you excavate them. So while they might not look glamorous as they come out of the soil, they tell us something that no other find can. You can tell from a piece of pot what a person perhaps ate for dinner by looking at organic residue analysis, but you can never tell from an object how someone felt about something. And the tablets really fill that gap. They tell us how people felt about things, how they felt about being invited to a birthday party. How they felt about someone borrowing their castration shears and not returning them promptly enough. How they felt about the state of the road and believe you me they felt really bad about

the state of the road. We've got a four page tablet ranting about how bad the roads around Vindolanda are. So those are the most extraordinary finds from the anaerobic. Of course something that really strikes a chord with the public is also the shoes. We've got a collection of 7,000 leather objects and of them more than 5,000 are shoes. Of those shoes a good percentage is shoes from women and children, thus contradicting the perceived wisdom that Vindolanda and Hadrian's Wall was a place where men trumped around with their spears and their shields and did nothing but war. The Vindolanda team have uncovered many remarkable finds over past excavation seasons,

indeed over the past half century, and the team were hoping to discover more in the big dig of 2021. The first thing that we wanted to do in 2021 was to catch up with ourselves. Unfortunately, 2020 was a bit of an underwhelming excavation year. Participation to the excavation was limited to myself and the director, so we could only do a few little bits and bobs. The idea was that we would roll out the grass from the excavation area and expose all of the post-Roman and the third and fourth century buildings on the site. And we knew that this was going to be a rubble field, that we were going to have a heck of a lot of stone lying around.

But within that rubble, we would have trace elements of British buildings smashed through the Roman layers and that those would be really hard to detect. We also thought that it wasn't going to produce a lot of stuff because it used to be called the Dark Ages for a reason. There wasn't very much stuff coming out of the ground at the end of Roman Britain. They're not ceramic anymore. They're not using coins, the material culture that they had. They tended to recycle. But we got some nice surprises.

With their aims established, in late March 2021 the excavation got underway. The first building the team set their sights on was the Scola, a building right on the edge of the excavation area that had already been partially excavated in 2020. Well we know it's contemporary with the construction of the last stone fort. It's all built with the same quarried stone. It's in the original planning of that last fort of Vindolanda. So it was always in the mind of the commanding officer to have that space dedicated to that purpose. It's a huge building. It's a very long space. It's about 35 to 40 meters long, about four or five meters wide. And on the ground floor, it's got lots of different rooms. And three of those rooms have got very large ovens in. So its main purpose is to

produce meals and food and to entertain the officers and not just from our site but also visiting people as well coming in to spend time at Vindolanda when they're coming from other forts and other communities. So it has a very social purpose. Skolas are some of my favourite buildings. They are amazing in that they form not only a social hubbub, but also a kind of administrative one in which the decision making or the informal decision making, if you wish, is taking place. How many times we all decided life changing things over dinner. So I really, I really enjoy excavating them. They really bring to life the whole idea of a community at Vindolanda for me.

They would have had not only an administrative importance but a social importance, of course. It's where the middle ranks and the officers would have mingled and ideas and exchange and information would have taken place. Thanks to objects such as the Vindolanda tablets, we know quite a bit about Roman officers in Britain, particularly about those stationed at Vindolanda. Both from the higher-up hierarchy, the prefects, the commanding officers,

where we've got several names, not just from the writing tablets, but also from inscriptions on stone, so we know our 3rd century, or a couple of our 3rd century commanders, and we know they had their families with them. We also know, of course, quite a lot about the military structure itself. And there are spaces in those forts, not just Vindolanda, but right across the Empire, where certain classes of people don't have an official home. So we're talking about here about the quartermaster, the vet, the doctor, the baoneator, the bathhouse keeper.

If they're living inside the fort, they're unlikely to be in traditional barracks. And so our officers' mess, our officers' clubhouse, isn't just a place they go to eat, it's a place they probably lived in too. And that's really, really important to find those homes for people who would otherwise be homeless in the archaeological record. As the team excavated the scola, homeless in the archaeological record. As the team excavated the Schola, it wasn't long before they started uncovering artefacts. So we found various types of objects from the Schola. First and primarily, a lot of really nice pottery. Some quite filthy, erotic pottery, some samian with some very dirty scenes on. So these guys, you know, they're having a bit of fun in there as well.

Quite a lot of evidence for wine and other storage and food and amphora and things like that. So all about the consumption of food and meals. Of course, from the spaces in which food was consumed, you would also expect a little bit of droppings, if you will. So bits that are not very well secured, buckles, bits of earrings, bits of brooches, things that have dropped onto the floor that we've found thousands of years later. One of the most intriguing objects found from the building was a small decorative griffin foot. Originally, this foot was probably connected to a larger object, and it perhaps served as one of the stylised legs to a small piece of furniture, perhaps a box. We get all sorts of little artefacts which are associated with personal

references to people's religion or their beliefs. And the griffon, of course, is an important beast, an ancient beast, which guards things, particularly guards money or other things like this. And getting a little griffon's foot, which may have been ornamentally attached to a box or may have been a little figurine, is just a reminder that people are storing special things in their own spaces, in particular buildings like the Scholar and those around about it. And that, of course, that some of the occupants of that space

were wealthy individuals, some of the most wealthy individuals, in fact, in Roman Britain. The Roman army gets regular pay three times a year. They're already, every soldier is in the upper 30% of wealthy people in Britain. But the officers, of course, are a step or two well above that. So it sort of sets your imagination going, what kind of stuff did these guys have with them? What were they storing in those buildings and spaces? And why did they need a representation of a griffin, this ancient mythical beast, to guard the stuff that they had? Each artifact like that gives you a little window into a bigger picture, into a bigger scene. It

reminds you of the things that you can't see, as well as the things that are before you. The griffin foot was an extraordinary discovery, but of all the objects found in the scola, foot was an extraordinary discovery. But of all the objects found in the Scola, there was one that has rocked the internet. A Roman tile embedded with a lovely dog paw print. The tile with the dog paw print is a very interesting find that seems to have taken the world by storm. It received an inordinate amount of like on our social media and it's just a, I hate to disappoint the viewers, but it's a very common find. It is lovely to see however that not only people but also animals populated Bindelanda. The tile in itself fits comfortably in a hand, it would have been part perhaps of a roof, but what we do know for certain is that it was laid out at

some point to dry by its maker and that a dog ran over it leaving the print into the fresh clay and what we have really when we really zoom in is even the footprint the really the skin print of the dog this unique signature of this one animal we have lots of other tiles with lots of footprints and fingerprints from Vindolanda. One year we found a really nice one which had a dog print and then somebody scratched the name Fidelis next to the tile, which kind of translates roughly in Fido. So, you know, dogs were pretty popular pets here at Bindelander. It's wonderful. It's a reminder of, again, things which you can't see in this period.

The animal bones don't survive terribly well from the third, fourth centuries. They do from earlier periods where we've got plenty of remains of dogs and other creatures. But from this period, they're much more slight or slender on the ground. But this animal here has managed to leave its little mark and remind us that it's not just people we're looking for. We're looking for all the creatures too. There has been a lot of research done at Vindolanda, but also wider on the Roman frontier, about the domestication of dogs. We've got quite a lot of information about what breeds of dogs would have been available to the Romans, going from the rather yappy terriers used to control pests like rat, onto much bigger breeds

similar to our modern day Irish wolfhound, which would have been used for hunting purposes. And in terms of other pets, we've only got two or three partial cat skeletons from the site. So dogs versus cats in military context, well, the dogs are winning by a long, long way. And we may have had wild cats coming in and things like that, but mainly dogs. In terms of other domestic animals, not much on the ground.

We have, of course, evidence of foxes and other wild creatures around about, deer, wild boar. It's quite a menagerie of different animals that the Romans interfaced with, but perhaps a pet that you wouldn't think of. We found evidence from the granaries just adjacent to the Schola, just across the road, where when we excavated that building in 2008, we found the little dung balls from two or three owls. And inside those dung balls, we had the tiny remains

of mouse skeletons still preserved from the owl droppings. Now those owls must have been encouraged to occupy that granary space just across the road from where we're excavating now so they can keep the mouse infestation down. So they're not just dealing with pets that are wandering around the ground and used for keeping the rats and mice down in terms of dogs and cats and other animals. They're also cultivating the creatures that are wandering around the ground and used for keeping the rats and mice down, in terms of dogs and cats and other animals. They're also cultivating the creatures that are flying around the skies of Indolanda. And it gives us a different essence, a different sense of how the Romans are using all of the landscape around them to their advantage while they're living at the site.

From the dog paw print, to erotic pottery, to a large stone weight, excavating the Scola produced a series of artefacts at the start of the 2021 season. But for Andrew, Marta and their team, this was just the beginning. There was still so much more to do. Next on the list was to remove the turf and topsoil from the rest of the excavation area, underneath which was a huge mass of rubble. Once you get under the turf, you're dealing with the end of Roman Britain and what happens next. The British people coming next are mainly putting timber construction through the end of Roman Britain. And what they're putting their timber buildings through are the collapsed rubble of all the Roman structures that came before it.

And of course those buildings are collapsing onto the street, they're collapsing inside of rooms. structures that came before it. And of course, those buildings are collapsing onto the street, they're collapsing inside of rooms. The post-Roman inhabitants of Vindolanda moved things around to reuse them as foundations for timber building, sometimes respecting the previous constructions, so fitting in within the various barracks and Roman spaces, and sometimes completely ignoring them, blocking up roads and throwing out entire rooms and entire spaces. And so you literally have a mound of discombobulated rubble right across the site. And frankly, it's the biggest field of rocks I've witnessed in 10 years of being an archaeologist. Excavating this rubble layer was a big challenge for the Vindolanda team.

But soon, emerging from the debris, the rewards came. So as we start to gently work back through the rubble, some structures start to appear, where you start to see patterns developing amongst those stones. Now, sometimes they're straight walls, and they're nice and easy to navigate and see. Other times, you can really see where the post pits and timber buildings have come through, and then you're mapping those in and you, like joining the dots, you start to see

a building that's long, long gone start to reappear before your eyes as you can get a sense of where you are in that space. Ovens and other features like that start to appear, domestic spaces. And our biggest surprise, perhaps, as we came back across the rubble was yet another apsidal structure, another church sitting amongst that rubble at the site. This church is the sixth discovered at Vindolanda. So what do we know about these structures and why did they come to dominate the site? So we are now at a stage in which we have several churches at Vindolanda and we distinguish them by their style of construction. There is two main styles of construction and one is a sort of reuse of earlier

fourth century structures. So you have a square room and onto that square room an apse is bolted. However, in the quadrant that we've been investigating during the 2021 season, what we had is a different style of church, which is shaped a bit like a rocket. It's got a straight nave and an apse at the end. We know that it had a timber building that was built across the top of it. So it wasn't the last thing that was built in that part of the site. So most likely 5th century in date. It's interesting that those churches really start to proliferate at Bindolanda. We are starting to have more numerous churches in the rocket style than we have in the earlier

basilica shape, kind of very Roman inspired. So it seems like there is an evolution in the shape of the church from something more adhering to Christianity in the Roman period, to something completely different, perhaps more apt to the Celtic Christianity that comes from places like Iona. We know now that little bit of the history of the place. We know that it's gone from being a military base, to a war band centre with some Christians, to a monastic base or a monastic centre in the 5th and 6th centuries. And that's a real win because until

the excavations over the last few years took place, the last part of that story was still an unfolding enigma. But now, after the work we've been doing this year and the previous couple, we can say with absolute surety that we have a monastic centre at Vindolanda in the 5th and 6th centuries. This post-Roman Christian community at Vindolanda was further affirmed by the artefacts discovered around the church. So in a domestic space, in a line of little houses that had been built across the top of old demolished military barracks, we started picking up rooms and buildings and structures and material culture associated with those buildings and structures. Little basic crosses on stones, little Christian symbols, but also some very late Roman

pottery that had beautifully hand-painted little crosses with palm leaves in circles, which had been then curated and kept inside those spaces as Christian symbols. We also managed to find an absolutely stunning bronze plate or plaque with three little symbols of the Holy Trinity embossed and enameled on this box lid, still surviving just across the street from the church in that more domestic space. And perhaps most intriguingly of all, for me anyway, we got a very badly carved stone in the rubble of that building, a very badly carved stone in the rubble of that building, which appears to carry an inscription, which may say, yakit, here lies, which is a Christian, of course, way to explain,

here lies somebody in the ground. So we've got evidence perhaps of a Christian burial nearby. We don't have a body, but we have potentially part of the tombstone that went with it. Have you heard of the teenage werewolf prosecuted in 1603? Did you know that the 17th century British government relied heavily on female spies?

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wherever you get your podcasts. But there was one particular object discovered nearby the church that is truly astonishing. One of the most interesting finds from the domestic area surrounding the church is a beautiful copper alloy lid. It's backed onto some iron and that has really aided its preservation. On the lid you can see a design called a triskele. A triskele is a design with three spirals departing one away from the other and there is three dots which have been enamelled and might have even held some nice gemstones. The lid is in really spectacular

state of preservation for the level that it was found at and it was beautifully excavated by one of our volunteers and it tells us that the dark ages are not so dark, that all of these people who live at Vindolanda after the so-called abandonment of Roman Britain are not just savages who don't know how to read or write and have got nothing nice. They've got some pretty good material culture and they've got a pretty cosy life here at Bindolanda. The area around the church proved a gold mine for stunning finds and things didn't stop with the copper lid. So about halfway through the season, on a particularly rainy day, two of our longest serving volunteers, David and Richie, found a rather lovely object. They were pretty upset about it all because I had just moved them from a different area into the area that they were excavating.

There was a lot of grumbling about going for dinner and what would Andrew say if he saw this. However, the grumbling was quickly resolved as one of the two started to uncover the legs of a carved figure. The figure is carved in sandstone and what ended up being the discovery is a sandstone altar. It's portable you can happily cradle it in your arm and it represents a naked figure accompanied by a horse. The naked figure is holding a spear in his hand and has got a rather funky hat with some lovely decoration on the top. It's special and it's rare for a couple of different reasons. One, archaeologically, is face up in the ground.

So to survive to the quality that it has and the definition that it has over 1,600 years is amazing. Because normally anything face-up that's made of soft sandstone will be weathered away to a nub. And you'll just get a very soft impression of what used to be there. So that's the first thing. Absolutely incredible that it survived so well. And we think we probably have to thank our post-Roman people for that because they've remodeled that area.

And in doing so, they've buried that lovely symbol in the ground. Who is it? Well, that's a different story. Unfortunately it doesn't have an inscription at the bottom to tell us who the figure is. It could be Mars, it could be various different figures. There's been lots of speculation about that. We may never know for sure but what is really interesting to me personally is just how well carved it is. Now a lot of our carvings from the site, particularly when we get into the 4th century context, are quite rude or crude. They're very amateurish to be perfectly honest. They're local representations of something else. But this has got that classical style to it and it's very well done. So it shows us that in the late Roman period

we've still got a few people knocking around who are really good artisans and can do some very good work. It wasn't just the post-Roman church that removing the rubble layer revealed. The outline of other structures began to appear, including that of a Roman cavalry barrack. So the cavalry barrack was a real issue for us simply because it had been so badly damaged by the post-Roman buildings on top. And also the way it had been built didn't help us either. So late Roman structures of Inland tend to recycle stone from all other parts of the site. They're not fresh quarry jobs like our Skola, our officers' clubhouse, which is very posh in comparison. So you've got a lot of mudstone, a lot of all sorts of jagged stuff in there, which doesn't hold together very well. So we've had to excavate it very, very carefully. And of course, the other issue we've got is it's a heavy, heavy stone

building in one of the last phases of the site. So it's crushed the material underneath it, and the whole thing's wobbled and moved through time. And the floors are incredibly uneven. And so it has been full of rubble, a real challenge. But as we've worked through that rubble and established where the floors are inside the four principal rooms of the barrack, we found some very, very nice material on the floor, particularly cavalry sort of stuff. So lance heads are what we would hope to find in this building, and we sure did. Several lance heads were uncovered by Andrew, Marta and their team over the course of the 2021 season, again showing how this building once housed a contingent of spear-armed horsemen who patrolled this northern border of the Roman Empire and lived at Vindolanda.

So the Cavalry Barrack building was uncovered by removing the rubble of the post-Roman occupation of the site. It's a really interesting building. It's composed of four rooms which are oriented east to west, which is quite unusual because in the neighboring quadrant, the cavalry barracks are oriented north to south. The rooms inside the cavalry barracks are oriented north to south. And there is a lack of a central spine dividing the cavalry barrack in two. Normally, you see a central spine indicating that on one side, you would have room for the horses and on the other side Normally you see a central spine indicating that on one side you would have room for the horses and on the other side you would have room for the men, but unfortunately we don't have a central spine yet. The layout of the cavalry barrack at Vindolanda

and also at other places such as at Chester's is really interesting. Divided into two, each room was split between three troopers and their horses. There weren't any dedicated stables. But what else do we know about cavalry at Vindolanda? Roman cavalry at Vindolanda is a very interesting subject. There would have been garrisons and allay posted at Vindolanda throughout its history. However, in the 4th century, it seems like the cavalry is more of a troubleshooting element of the garrison. It seems like there is two main types of inhabitants of Vindolanda in the 4th century. There is the so-called limitani, which are the frontier soldiers permanently based at the site,

and there is the comitatensis, and it looks like the comitatensis would be the cavalry who swoops in, troubleshoots, solves the problem, has dedicated rooms that they can occupy at any given time, but isn't permanently based at the site and comes and goes really as they please. So it tells us that we've got those two different groups and that some people have in the land to stick around and some are actually officially pulled out by the army and the soldiers. And it gives us two different elements to what life would be like on the community here 2,000 years ago. From the cavalry barrack to the church to the scola, so far the team had excavated areas dating to Vindolanda's later history. But another primary aim of the 2021 excavation was to dig deeper.

In particular, to find the traces of an enigmatic series of round structures, or roundhouses, constructed at Vindolanda during the early 3rd century, when the Roman emperor Septimius Severus came to Britain and launched a series of bloody, genocidal campaigns north of Hadrian's Wall. Finally, as the excavation neared its end, the team turned their attention to finding these peculiar earlier structures, and more. So in the last month of the excavations on the site, we decided to go down below the level of the Schola,

get into the very, very early 3rd century, looking for the circular huts, the Schola, get into the very, very early third century, looking for the circular huts, the roundhouses, which were one of the primary aims of our excavations, to learn more about that period, but also where we could start to get a sense of what happened with the first stone fort built on the site, the Antonine Fort. And sure enough, as soon as we looked for it, that building started to appear pretty rapidly. And we were very, very lucky because only in the last week of the excavation, in one particular area under the rubble yard, we also came across the trace elements of our roundhouses, our circular huts. And here we got a real surprise. We were expecting, you know, the traditional stone circles that we've had elsewhere on the site.

But what we actually found was one of our stone roundhouses cut out by the remains of a timber one. And this is the first time we've ever encountered a multi-phase in our roundhouse period, where you've got one building cutting out another. So what's this all about? Who did this? Why get rid of a perfectly reasonable stone house and construct a wooden one instead? And why construct these buildings as roundhouses within this early 3rd century Roman fort? So they mirror construction of local buildings such as the Iron Age roundhouses which are so abundant in the area. However, the Iron Age roundhouses are generally enclosed in round ditches as well,

while these ones are very carefully arranged in a very military fashion. So it's really interesting to see a round building where you expect a square one. But, you know, the Romans are apt to throw some surprises into Roman forts at all times. Evidently, mystery still abounds surrounding the purpose of these Severan roundhouses. But hopefully the team will find out more in next year's excavation. But let's go back to this year's excavation for now. Because the last month of the excavation did reveal these traces of roundhouses, but they also revealed the remnants of the first stone fort at Vindolanda,

constructed around 150 AD, some 80 years after Vindolanda was first constructed by the Romans. It seems that the change from timber to stone is connected with the abandonment of the Antonine frontier in Scotland and with the repopulation of Hadrian's Wall and the recommissioning, if you wish. And there is that sense of permanence creeping in to an otherwise situation where the garrison would always think, we're going to be on the move, we're going to go back into the north of Britain,

we're going to finish the job and ultimately we're going to go home, wherever home is, we're going to get out of Britain because we'd have done the job and the island would have been pacified and we no longer need to stay here. But of course history teaches us that never happened, they stuck around till the very, very end. Choice get made about what stays and what goes and what forts are going to get a massive refurb and what forts are going to be ignored. And Bindalanda seems to be one of those forts that gets a really nice refurb, gets some lovely Antonine building,

beautiful washouts, amazing courtyard building with lovely opus signinum, waterproof floors. So we're privileged in that, that we seem to have been picked as a reasonable choice for stone refurbishment. From these earlier lower-down structures, the Vindolanda team started unearthing more stunning artefacts. As we reach in the lowest level, as we abandon the 4th century and the post-Roman period, and we reach down into 213 and earlier, you know, the early 3rd century, we are starting to get better preservation. And once you get to the Antonine period, to 160 to 200 AD, you start getting some rather beautiful stuff. One of the most

striking finds was a beautiful millefiori brooch and these are disc brooches which are covered in enamel which simulates a flower meadow. So that was really lovely to find and we also had a solid silver snake terminus so kind of the end of a snake with its head, which looks like it would have been part of a bracelet. So as you go down, the preservation goes up and the finds become more and more intriguing and your preservation becomes more and more surprising. By the time the excavation reached its end in late September 2021. The multi-phased nature of this part of Vindolanda was clear to see. So the visitor who comes and sees Vindolanda while we are excavating,

but also while we're not excavating, we'll be able to catch a cut through, a sort of section in time of what happened at Vindolanda from all the way to the post-Roman period to about 160 AD. And that's kind of where we stopped at this excavation season. There is things that are more visible, you know, the Scola is right there at the forefront and it's beautifully built and it's obvious for anybody to spot. So that's your 213 layer. But there is also hardly visible things that are very interesting. So, for example, there is traces of roundhouses, which date between 200 and 212 AD.

And we have those roundhouses in two versions. For the first time, we have stone remains of roundhouses and timber remains of round buildings that cut through the roundhouses. So those are not immediate to the eye as you walk by on the excavation, but as you really squint and try and peer into the excavation and look to understand what's going on, you'll be able to pick out all of these different levels. I think it's really fascinating to walk through a place

in which you have a time slice. Really, you're travelling through time as well as travelling through space. But what's most exciting of all is what's still to come. So under the stone buildings in this part of the site, what we hope to find next year or the year after, but hopefully next year, are the foundations and the surviving parts of a commanding officer's house that was built at Vindolanda a good hundred years before the structures that we're looking at now, the earliest of the structures, the Schola. Now that commanding

officer's house was partly excavated on the other side of the fort wall by my father in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. But at least half of the building is under the space that we're looking at now. And of course that's not the only timber building that will be there. There will be a host of buildings, five or six structures, one on top of the other, until we get down to the farmer's field that Vindolanda is sitting on in its entirety. So this is where the real excitement is going to come next, as we get into those anaerobically preserved soils, those rich deposits where not just the inorganic stuff survives, like your brooches, your bricks, your tiles, your coins, your spears, but where your boots, your shoes, your leather, your wood, your textile survives.

And that gives us such a much more diverse set of tools in which to tell the story of the site. Reaching that highly sought-after anaerobic level, however, is easier said than done. So to get through to the anaerobic level, you've got to get under the foundations of those heavy stone buildings. And that's no mean feat. We've already talked about the rubble and how challenging that is. Well, the foundations for those heavy buildings, metres of clay. And the only way to do it,

well, is to roll up your sleeves, get a spade out and dig through it. It's backbreaking work. There is metres of clay, sometimes, you you know over a meter of clay and stone that needs to be gotten through in order to get down to the anaerobic levels. Of course we didn't see this as a hindrance, it's part of the process. I think there is a misunderstanding that archaeology equates treasure hunting. Even the ugliest, biggest, baddest boulder of clay tells us something about the construction of the site. So don't be under the impression that we just throw some plastic explosive there and blow it all up in order to get to the interesting and cool stuff. It is all very carefully investigated, it is all documented and carefully excavated.

It doesn't make any less hard work because the clay is very, very hard and it's been sitting there for about a thousand years, so it has no intention to move. But the really interesting thing is that paradoxically, the lack of buildings is a great help towards us reaching the lower levels. And that's because when you have a large space, like the one we've been talking about on site, a large cobbled courtyard in which there is no buildings whatsoever, no foundations, you've got a really wide open area

in which you can go down safely and explore those lower levels. So we've opened little windows to really check what we were in for in the next two years, but the real work will come when we will lift that cobbled yard and go underneath to explore those anaerobic layers. But you know as soon as you've hit the right level because the first thing that hits you, apart from a colour change and you get very dark soil, is an incredible rich smell. And that smell are the gases that are coming off the ground for the first time

as this has been opened up to the elements, the oxygen getting back in, for almost 2,000 years. And so instantly you know that you've got a chance when you get that smell, that rich, rotting smell, that anything can survive. With this exciting anaerobic prospect, 2022 promises to be a very exciting year for the Vindolanda team. The excavation will begin in March. Backed by an army of passionate staff and dedicated volunteers, the show goes on.

The work at the Vindolanda Trust doesn't stop during the winter. The work really goes on behind the scenes. Every year we're committed to updating our museums and putting the latest finds on display. So visitors will be already able to see the lovely altar of which we talked about on display in the latest find case. So my archaeological team, headed by myself, we're a small part of a much bigger machine.

And the most of the people who come along and take part on the excavations are volunteers. They're giving their free time to come and join us for two weeks to help us on this endeavour. And they're an incredible and amazing bunch of people. They have to learn the skills and the techniques and to gain the confidence that they need to do the job well. But we find invariably after the first four or five days when people come and join us that they gain those skills very, very quickly quickly they become confident and you can see them grow and you can also see how that brings the benefits to the archaeology and the history of the site as they become really talented and skilled about what they're doing so we end up welcoming three or four hundred

volunteers every year to the excavations. They become friends of course, as well as colleagues, and it's wonderful to see them grow as individuals and to see their experience give them so much joy and pleasure, and that helps to feed the energy that we need to keep going through a long and hard season. We're excited about next year excavation because we've had a glimpse of what's to come. We are looking forward to exploring more of the 3rd century buildings. We've had that beautiful scola as a tantalising glimpse of what's there. So we need to get under the 4th century cavalry barracks and explore more of what 213 AD has to offer. We then have to go underneath and really untangle the puzzle of the roundhouses. Are we going to have more? Are we not going to have more?

Are they going to be made of stone? Are they going to be made of timber? Is there even going to be any? Is the ditch that we found in the next door quadrant in between the roundhouse going to continue right across? Is it not? It's all very mysterious. And finally, under the roundhouses, that's the gaping hole, the anaerobic waiting for us with its tantalising secrets. Looking at the site now, as we do, we know and understand thoroughly that the best is yet to come because we're just about to enter the organic preservation layers of Indolanda over the next few months of excavation. And when we do that,

it'll completely change the order of magnitude of the sort of material we can get coming from this site. It'll blow us away what we're going to be finding coming out next. So it's been great. We've learned a lot about Vindolandra over the past 12 months and the past six months of excavation, but the best is definitely yet to come. I hope you've enjoyed this very special Ancients episode all about Vindolanda's 2021 excavation with the legends that are Marta Alberti and Dr. Andrew Burley. Now, if you'd like to watch the full documentary, you can do so over on HistoryHitsTV, access.historyhits.com, and if you search for Vindolanda Unearthed. Now, if you've enjoyed this podcast and you're looking for more fantastic, fascinating ancients content,

I mean, of course you are, then why not subscribe to our Ancients newsletter, which is in the bio below. Thank you.