A Tour of the Excavations at Vindolanda [10:40]

Vindolanda was up by Hadrian's Wall.

The rest of the Vindolanda keyword, sorted:

Recovering Lost Artifacts From An Ancient Roman Mass Grave [52:13] [12/05/2025]
"There is Something Very Different Going on Here": Archaeologists Keep Finding Gigantic Shoes at This 2000-Year-Old Roman Site [07/14/2025]
Sculptural Relief of Roman Victory Goddess Uncovered at Vindolanda [06/03/2025]
Archaeologists uncover a 'wonderful' 1-inch penis pendant at a Roman fort in Northumberland - and say it was probably a good luck charm for a soldier [05/06/2025]
Silver medal featuring winged Medusa discovered at Roman fort near Hadrian's Wall [07/09/2023]
Disembodied wooden phallus could be a Roman sex toy [02/21/2023]
Roman Cornu Mouthpiece Uncovered at Vindolanda [09/25/2022]
Volunteer delighted to uncover very rude Ancient Roman graffiti at Vindolanda [06/01/2022]
The Vindolanda Tablets: Letters Home from the Roman Forces in Britain [10/04/2021]
Ancient Carving Found in England May Represent Hybrid Roman Deity [07/10/2021]
Roman dog with fur intact dug up at Vindolanda fort [09/02/2020]
Hadrian's Wall dig reveals oldest Christian graffiti on chalice [08/29/2020]
The graffiti left by the Romans working on Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland [03/08/2020]
Roman soldiers' very rude graffiti revealed near Hadrian's Wall [02/27/2019]
Early Roman 'horseshoes' dug up from Vindolanda fort ditch [08/09/2018]
Rare Roman ring found on Cumbrian beach [05/28/2018]
Rare Roman boxing gloves found near Hadrian's Wall [03/13/2018]
Vindolanda Roman Fort Yields Hundreds of Shoes [10/11/2016]
Ancient footprint discovery leaves lasting impression at Vindolanda [07/01/2015]
Hadrian's Wall dig unearths 2,000-year-old toilet seat [08/28/2014]
Hope for further Vindolanda tablet discoveries [05/05/2014]
Ancient graves hint at cultural shift to Anglo-Saxon Britain [02/17/2014]
A tablet bearing a birthday party invite includes the earliest Latin script penned by a woman [09/10/2013]
Archaeologists discover a hoard of silver Roman denarii coins at Vindolanda [07/22/2011]
(June 21st, 2011) Roman camp that housed refugees fleeing Scottish unrest discovered near Hadrian's [06/21/2011]
Vindolanda Tablets come home [09/29/2010]
Hadrian's Wall child murder: estimated time of death pre-367AD [09/16/2010]
Mysterious ancient altar found in Roman fort (In England) [07/25/2009]
Roman era reveals expenses claims [06/08/2009]
Hadrian's wall boosted economy for ancient Britons, archaeologists discover [11/24/2008]
Romans Were Upper Crust On Daily Bread [05/21/2008]
The Romans Carried Out Cataract Operations [02/09/2008]
An Outing For Hadrian At The British Museum [01/10/2008]
Roman Tombstone Found At Inveresk [10/29/2007]
Hunting For Hadrian [01/25/2007]
Spectacular Brooch Find May 'Unlock Secrets Of Hadrian's Wall' [05/20/2006]
Literacy in the Time of Jesus - Could His Words Have Been Recorded in His Lifetime? [02/07/2006]
Fragments of Ancient Empire [04/06/2005]
Roman Souvenir Of (Hadrian's) Wall Found [09/30/2003]

Transcript:
Welcome to Vindolanda
So welcome to the wind under excavations. My name is Dr. Andrew Burley; I'm the director of excavations for the Finland of Trust, and Vindolanda is a small frontier fort at the edge of the Roman Empire. But it's one that has an incredibly rich and vibrant history, mainly because actually, I said it's one fort; there are many forts here built one on top of the other, creating meters of archaeology underneath your feet when you walk around the site.

And those meters of archaeology create incredible preservation layers—anaerobic deposits—such in three layers where things that would normally rot away at the top of sites, which is what you normally get on an excavation, you get oxidized levels that disappear completely. At those levels, they're still preserved in the ground here in the moist soil of Vindolanda. What we're looking at in the trenches around about us are a whole series of timber buildings, one stacked on top of another, the remains of early timber forts from the beginning of the conquest of Roman Britain, stretching all the way through to the Hadrianic period. And then once you get beyond the Hadrianic period, they start building in stone on this particular site, which is fantastic.

Now, there's a range of artifacts we get from here that really put the flesh on the bones of Roman history. So what we're talking about? We're talking about boots and shoes—over five and a half thousand leather artifacts that come from this site—absolutely incredible! Each one of those shoes is a direct connection to the person who wore it, and it's transformed our knowledge of the history of the Roman army. So as an example of this, when we look at barracks and buildings around like this, we tend to think of Roman soldiers—big hairy Roman soldiers, mainly men—but when we look at the shoes, we find over 50 percent of the people who lived in some of these buildings were women and children, adolescents, non-adult males. And that's transformed our understanding and appreciation of society here on frontier bases like this over two thousand years ago.

The most precious thing we get from the levels down here in the thick mud, preserved, encased, and buried in those deposits, are the Roman letters—the writing tablets. Thin pieces of wood about the size of a postcard, covered, if we're lucky, in a cursive ink script written with an ink pen. Now, they're about the size of postcards, about the consistency of damp blotting paper—something like 80 to 120 grams. They're very, very thin paper, and it's incredible that they survive in these deposits. But even more incredible when you open up and you read some of those letters because they're first-hand accounts; they really tell me what's going on. They just give the sort of information you can't possibly get from any other source on an excavation.

So what am I talking about here? I'm talking about packages sent from home, disputes between Roman soldiers, farewells and greetings, and business deals. I'm talking about the vet that lent his castration share to a friend who hasn't returned them. I'm talking about the 'boundator,' the guy in charge of the bathhouse who hasn't paid his clubhouse fees and is going to be ejected from the clubhouse, and a very, very angry commanding officer who hasn't got the right stuff because his slaves forgot to send it. So all of those characters start to come alive through their writings, their letters, and their artifacts, and the preservation of the site.

Now, the challenge we face getting down to those levels is really quite complex. We can't remove the buildings on the very, very top of the site because they're part of the Roman and post-Roman history of the place. So we have to work within their walls and in the spaces outside the buildings to drop the trenches down to have increasingly small windows into the past as we go lower and lower and lower. Then we meet the water table coming up to rise to meet us on the other side. That's a real challenge. But the biggest challenge we face today at sites like Vindolanda with the anaerobic deposits is climate change. Unfortunately, a lot of offenses that you see here today before you are quite low; they're not very high at all. Twenty to thirty years ago, we might expect to find these deposits at twice the thickness that you're seeing today. And as the site starts to dry out, terrific heat waves come through, and then torrential rain that follows it is introducing new oxygen, new bacteria, new chemistry into the ground and slowly rotting away the deposits before we can get to them. So we're on a bit of a mission at Vindolanda in the Finland address to try and rescue as much information as we possibly can before climate change beats us to it.
The Wooden Underworld
So what we're looking at down here is a typical wattle and daub fence that's collapsed, been pushed over by the Roman army. You can still see the beautiful weave of the wattle as it's running through the upright and has been forced down, and you can also see the color of the water working its way between the various little sticks. This has been knocked down by the Roman army; it's demolition on the way out. When the soldiers finish their tours of duty, they purposely bulldoze in Vindolanda; they pull it apart, they knock it down to make sure there's nothing here that the nasty little Britons can get their hands on until the next Roman garrison comes in, and their first job is to rebuild it—build it again. And it happens at this site nine times—nine forts completely rebuilt, slapped onto the demolished remains of the audio bases. It sounds crazy to us, but one of the reasons they do this complete demolition and rebuild is also that the Roman army can train as a unit how to build their forts. What better way to train than to actually have to do it?

So we're looking at Roman handiwork, and preserved under this fence and under this mud are three or four more buildings. We've got a long way to go here before we get to the bottom of Vindolanda. Now, on the other side, you've got a bit of a street that should be cut through, and then we get one of the large cavalry barracks at the site. So where the team is working here, we've got a whole series of cuts through the natural building clay, and in those cuts, they put uprights which mark their partition walls inside the buildings. We've got a little pit coming down here for the water, and on the other side of the structures, you can see layers of stone inside the walls of the rooms, and they're capping more pits. Those pits are the urine pits for horses, so these are the stables on this particular side. And on the other side, a divided wall where my team are working over there, we start to pick up the living accommodation for the soldiers and their families.

It looks like a forest of little uprights, little bits of timber here, because what we're actually looking at are two or three buildings superimposed one across the other. So the rooms aren't quite as small as you imagine when you look at this; they're about twice the size, and some of the posts go from one building, and some of the posts go for another. So it's quite complex, but that's the nature of Vindolanda—multiple layers of archaeology, sometimes very distinct and apart, sometimes squeezed all together. Our job, which is quite fun, is to untangle all of those.
Layers of History
So we're in the southwest quadrant of the last stone fort of Vindolanda, and around us, you can see the remains of the end of Roman Britain—the really rubbly foundations of big fourth-century cavalry barracks. Above those, we had fifth and sixth-century houses built by British people and a little church at the top of the street. Below those structures, you can see two very large plinth foundations in the middle of the cobbled road there, and they're at the front of what we believe was an old temple, which went underneath the cavalry barracks on the right-hand side. So two very different types of buildings, two very different styles of structure, two different centuries of occupation of Vindolanda.

And the deeper you go, the more you unwind. Going past through the street and underneath our lovely cobble street, you start to get into the black organic preservation layers of the timber forts. Now, there are six of those on top of each other before you find the natural boulder clay—the farmer's field that was here for the Roman army, which was turned up. The objective of the excavations here is to try and establish where that natural field is across as much of the site as humanly possible and unravel the different periods of occupation and learn about the sometimes completely unique and separate units of people who called this place their home. There wasn't one single Vindolanda; there are many Vindalandas and very many different communities who called this space their home. Our mission is to tease out as much information about all of those different groups—what they have in common, what they didn't have in common, and how they called this place their home—sometimes for four years, sometimes for 40 years of their life, transforming this landscape and giving us this legacy that we see today.
Becoming Part of the Story
So when you come to Vindolanda, you come and make a visit; you see live archaeology going on for six months of the year. You see this place being slowly transformed. You can interact with the excavators, the volunteers, and the archaeologists and learn from them directly about the processes, the practices, and how this place has transformed our knowledge of Roman Britain and the history of the Roman army in the Roman Empire. And that sort of interaction, that sort of constant change, brings this site alive, and that's one of the best things about coming to visit. By coming to visit, you support the work, but also you get a sense of a place that's dynamic and constantly changing, and that's how this place always was through its entire history of use in this landscape. So it's nice to be able to make those connections.

And that's one of the things which makes people fall in love with Vindolanda, because every time they come, they see something new, and something new has come out of the ground—a new interpretation and a little bit more of the puzzle starting to lock into place. And that's what we need to do; we need to keep pushing on, pushing forward until eventually we can say we've learned as much as we possibly can about this site. This is only one of 14 forts on Hadrian's Wall, so there's over a thousand years of archaeology to go at this pace, which is quite rapid here but not rapid anywhere else. So come and support us, see what's going on, and see what Vindolanda is all about for yourself.
YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai.

Man!

They’re still working on Vindolanda!

Love that place.

We just bought an apartment one mile from Hadrian’s Wall.

Wow!

I'd imagine that work there will go on for a long while, mainly due to the discarded written notes. One scholar who had suspected that the Romans had a nickname for the locals said, in one discarded draft of a report, a Roman officer referred to them as "dirty little Brits".

The discovery of the written stuff FASCINATED me.

It’s a unique archive. There was a copy of a birthday party invitation in there.