Click on a question to hear Robin's answer:

What is the significance of the location of Vindolanda?

The thing you've got to bear in mind is that shortly after the Governor Agricola  had conquered much of Scotland, the emporer took away many of his forces for wars on the continent and so the Romans pulled back to this part of the world basically between Carlisle and Newcastle, the narrowest part of the isthmus, to create a sort of frontier zone.
And Vindolanda was one of three or four forts stuck on that frontier zone, what, 40 years before Hadrian's Wall was built. We are more or less midway between Carlise and Newcastle pressumably guarding the important road, the Stanegate Road, which carried all the Roman supplies.

Who were the people here?

We know we are blessed with some extraordinary information from the early forts here, and I may say we have nine different forts on top of each other here, it's quite an extraordinary build-up.
The earliest ones are preserved in what we call anaerobic conditions, which means that everything they left behind is preserved, so that includes their written documents and things.

The first regiment here is a cohort of Tongerens, who had basiclly come from what is now modern Belgium, but they are soon succeeded by some neighbours, the Batavians, the ninth cohort of Batavians, who are here until about 105 AD. Then we get the Tongerens back again, and then we get some legionary troops moving in as well, presumably because they are building the wall nearby. And so it goes on, and we are occupied all the way through to the very end of Roman Britain, which is somewhere around 400 and then some other people come in here, and we don't know who they are as they don't seem to be literate, or they didn't leave any inscriptions behind, and the place remains in occupation until round around about 600 / 700, and by then of course the people are Christians - we've got one or two Christian tombstones and bits and pieces lying about.

Then for a while the place was deserted, and of course this part of the world is caught up in the awful border conflicts with Scotland and you get William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, and all these unsavoury characters coming down here and equally unsavoury people, like Edward I, Edward
II and Edward III chasing them.
And both sides were as bad as each other, and this area, the whole of south-west Northumberland is really a wilderness until at last you get the union of the kings and then the Act of Union in 1707 and thereafter we become semi-civilised.

Tell us about the writing fragments you've found here

Well it all goes way back to 1973, when we were digging in these very deeply buried deposits where there were clearly wooden buildings right underneath everything else, and we were pulling out the most extraordinary material, material which shouldn't have survived; things like textiles, bits and pieces of socks and clothing and a mass ofleather and wooden objects and eggshells, feathers, leaves, twigs…
And then amongst them all was some tiny bits of wood, which looked as though they had been polished. There were two stuck together, and when I peeled them apart I couldn't believe it, there was a sort of ink hieroglyphic across them - they were, in fact, Roman stores accounts, various military matters, private correspondance, official correspondance, incredible! All written in what we call the cursive hand, which is very different to the capital letters. They are just getting handwriting going, and unfortunately certain scribes use their own symbols instead of the normal ones, so they are not terribly easy to read, but it's an absolutely bewildering amount of information.

Some of it is normal military stuff - orders and duty officers' reports, soldiers writing in to the commanding officer asking to be able to take some leave, all sorts of things like that. But then there is the private correspondance as well, including letters between commanding officers' wives, invitations to birthday parties, one commanding officer writing in here saying, "Look why don't you and the family just come and stay with us for a few days over the New Year" - you know, incredibly normal stuff.

It gives us an insight into what was going on on the frontier up here which, to be honest, we were not entitled to, it's absolutely brilliant. And if only these sort of documents could be found in the later levels, we really would know a lot about Hadrian's Wall. But they will only survive in deeply buried deposits, sealed deposits, where the oxygen can't get in. And if there's no oxygen, or very little oxygen, you don't get bacteria and therefore it's like a deep freeze, it just sits there. We've got about 1600 / 1700 of these documents now but we always want more.

It's a bit like a soap opera, you know, you get a lot of correspondence concerning one particular commanding officer: you gradually find out his name, you find out the regiment, you find out the name of his wife, the name of his friends, the fact he's got three children - but they still haven't named the children! We'll get more documents, you never know when they are coming, it's just litter, some of it's been shredded, but litter chucked away, and if you happen to be in the right place the stuff is there and oh it's wonderful.

Are there particular things you're hoping to find?

Oh yes, for example in several of the letters and things they mention the names of other Roman forts nearby. Now one or two of them we know, they give us the Roman name for modern Carlisle, for Ribchester on the Cumbrian coast, and so on, and for Corbridge, which is only 11 miles to the east of us.
But then they mention places like 'Breegar' and 'Satua'r and 'Yudlucium' - they are obviously nearby but we haven't got a clue where they are - or they may be early names for forts that are now known by something that was given to them later.

So we want a Roman road map, which is really a list of places and the distances apart, so we can find out where these things are. There's a lot more documents we want and given time we'll get them.
Vindolanda is strikingly different from many similar sites in that the archaeological work means it chanes a lot from year to year
We excavate for between five and six months every year and gradually build up a picture of the place and I've been doing this since, I hate to say it, 1949, with permanent work since 1970.
When I started I thought it might take about 25 years to complete the excavation of this site and many people said to me you must be wasting my time, or going very slowly to spin it out for 25 years! Having done nearly 40 years, we calculate there's about another 150-200 years left because the place is far bigger than we thought it was - we thought there might be two of three forts on top of each other, but there's nine!

Wherever you excavate within 30-40cm of the turf you come across the last of the Roman buildings, probably fairly battered by stone robbers and farmers, and so all that's got to be recorded, then you drop down to the next one and the next one and the next one and you end up 15-20ft down and it takes a long time.
You just don't know what you are going to find each year but you gradually build up a better picture of the site. I'm trying to write a book at the moment which gives a definite explanation of exactly what's been found here at Vindolanda, and while I sit down here trying to write a chapter, my colleges up top are probably altering the whole damn thing by finding something different! Every year we do solve one or two problems but we always create two or three more, and so it goes on.

And this museum now...well, we've have got an astonishing array of material in this museum, of which only a fraction is on display. We already have the largest collection of Roman textiles, Roman leather goods, Roman wooden objects - the largest of any in the Roman empire, but it will be dwarfed by what will eventually come from this place.
You may like to see the incredible variety of Roman shoes that we have on display - well I say shoes…boots, slippers, sandals, clogs... I've got 120 on display and I've got 3,400 upstairs in the store rooms. Goodness knows how many we'll end up with. I think the most we found in a day was 75 of these things.

You said there were nine forts on the site - were there structures basically the same?

No, no, nothing as simple as that. They bring in an infantry cohort 500-strong and then, for reasons entirely unknown, they take them away and shove in a regiment of 1,000 men part-mounted and so you have to build a totally different fort, and then they move out and so it goes on - you have forts of only three-and-a-half acres, some forts are seven acres,  some are built in wood, some are built in stone, and so it goes on…

But this is standard military matters, you know - why people are suddenly moved from A to B one doesn't now. We had a super-garrison here that was really enjoying themselves (the 9th Cohort of Batavians), and then they were suddenly shunted to the Danube to take part in a war, perhaps because they were water assault specialists - they were famed for being able to swim across the Danube in full gear, which makes you wonder why they were stationed here in the first place because we don't have such challenges round here, you can walk across the south Tyne - you don't have to swim it!

They shift them and then they bring in another regiment of infantry, and then they shift them and so it goes on… very interesting but very frustrating at times.
The other thing, of course, is that although we know what would be contained in a standard Roman fort - you know you've got barrack buildings, stables, workshops, a headquarters building, a couple of granaries, a nice big commanding officer's residence, a few fort latrines, that's the standard thing - I'd like to see a standard fort because I've never seen one. All the forts that I have come across have things that aren't standard in them… which, you know, keeps you on your toes at any rate.

Who were the people in a fort?

You've got to remember of course that we are not just dealing with Roman soldiers inside a fort. A Roman fort creates a much wider community wherever it settles - for a start inside the fort itself there are a number of non-combatants, you'll almost certainly get the commanding officer's family in there with his wives, servants, slaves - you have to bear in mind that Roman soldiers possessed slaves, and I can't believe that they would keep their slaves in special accommodation outside the fort because what's the point in having a slave if he or she is not available all the time.

Apart from that, outside the walls of the forts there is accommodation provided probably by the army for the wives and children, the merchants, craftsmen, all sorts of people, priests and veterans who have retired who gather around any fort that is settled in a place for a while.
Although Roman soldiers until the early 3rd century were not officially allowed to marry, that didn't deter them from having common law wives and obviously families. In due course when the soldiers retired from the army after their 25 years service, if they had survived that long, their children were legitimised when they were discharged from the army. The wives were not given any status at all but the children were legitimised as proper Romans.

So it's a big community, and on top of that outside of every fort there are the requirements for army installations. For example, our lot here, when they were 1,000-strong must have had a cavalry detatchment of 240: maybe 300-350 horses would be required, all the ox wagons to haul their goods around the place, 2-4 oxon per wagon - several hundred oxon. And if you're wanting oxon you're going to want some breeding stock, so you've got your ordinary cows as well.

Every group of six to eight men has a mule to carry the tent and all the camping equipment. Then there are all the pigs - pork is one of their favourite foods - and their sheep and their goats and their chickens and their geese A heck of a lot of animals are required and those animal require grazing, they need pens to keep them in, they need horse lines and, on top of all that, there's all the piles of wood that they are going to need, saw yards - it's a huge community.

How were they kept busy?

Our people up here because they happen to be settled in an area which is very rich in mineral resources are definitely engaging in the production of iron - plentiful iron ore near here - they are burning coal on their fires, and therefore they're mining coal, they've got to burn the limestone in order to get the line mortar for their buildings - there's a huge amount of industry going on. Quarrying… what a sordid job it was in those days with a sort of hammer and a chisel. it's quite amazing what they achieved with the very limited technology available to them, but having said that, of course, you've got a heck of a lot of men who've got nothing better to do. There is nothing more dangerous in any army than highly trained men with nothing to do - most good armies don't spend their time fighting.

The mere fact you've got a good army stops other people fighting you and that was very much the Roman tradition. And if they're not fighting - ok, you can occupy them for a while on manoeuvres and drill on the parade ground, but ultimately you've got to have some manual work to tire them out - you re-build buildings, you go and get some stone for this, that and the next, you repair a road, you dig a few extra ditches around your fort, and so on. And that keeps them busy.

There must have been a real buzz about the place and of course up here on the line of the wall - ultimately there are 13 forts all stationed within what 65 miles of each other and really there's about four miles, five miles between each fort and each community and I would think that the situation up here would be the same as it was for British regiments, stationed, for example, in my experience in the Canal Zone where when I was there our nextdoor neighbours were four miles away - it happened to be the Highland Light Infantry, and I know that we suffered many more casualties from the Highland Light Infantry than we did from the native Egyptians, and visa versa. It's one of the reasons why they did keep these people apart.

At one stage our lot here are Gauls, up at Housesteads they are Tongerens, further on at Chesters they are Spaniards, at Great Chesters they are Yugoslavs… rivalry is one good thing but too close rivalry in the evenings after a few beers is not necessarily very sensible. What has been encouraging to know… because we were wondering what would they be drinking here and there's a limit to how much honey-flavoured milk they're going to consume and wine in the ancient world was a notorious bad traveller. The Roman soldiers actually normally drank acetum, which is almost vinegar, watered down.

But here the evidence of the writing tablets show that they consumed a vast quantity of beer and they had their own brewery af Vindolanda. It's a barley-based beer which didn't go down well in Roman literature.  I think it was the emporer Gordian wrote a poem about British beer in which he said that "it smelt like a goat", but of course you don't drink beer for the smell as no doubt most of the Roman soldiers around here realised.
We've got a lovely letter from  a decurion, that's the offer from an officer in charge of a mounted troop, writing in to our prefect here. He'd been commanding a mixed squad of soldiers, from several sources doing manoeuvres or something, and he writes in to say, "Look, I've finished the job, what do you want me to do, to send them all back to their quarters or bring them all to Vindolanda? And by the way, the men have no beer left - will you please send some as soon as possible." Nothing much changes, you know!

By the same token, the importance of the mail in those days was as important as it is to modern soldiers and we often get letters coming in saying, "You awful man, I've written to you three times and you've never replied." Ah, lovely stuff…

How much do you know, and how much don't you know?

You never know what's around the next corner, we thought we'd got the early forts here cracked. By the end of last year we thought we knew exactly period 1, 2,  3, 4, 5 all wooden.
We were excavating at what we thought were the very fringes of the built-up area and underneath the whole lot we suddenly found another wooden building, or the remains of it, with the most massive posts of any building that we have ever seen up here. Normally the big oak uprights are about 15cm square something like this or maybe 20 - a big, strong oak timber. These things had 60cm square oak timbers every seven meters or so, an enormous building.

One of the problems is that we would like to date it accurately through dendrochronology, which is where they look at the tree rings and they have got an established build-up of tree rings now and they can date these things very well indeed. And if the timber still has its bark on it they can actually give you the month and the year that timber was felled.

The trouble is that these Roman joiners and carpenters are too efficient and they've cut off most off the bark and most of the sap wood and so sometimes you can only get an approximate date.
These timbers have just been analysed and this was a building put up some time between AD 83 and AD 119.  And it must be a legionary building but whether it's a different fort that we know nothing about, another fort there, have a word with me at the end of August and I might be able to tell you.