A project that will research one of the most significant archaeological finds ever made in the North East has been launched on the 50th anniversary of their discovery.
A stream of writing tablets flowed in and out of the Vindolanda Roman fort in Northumberland as its population went about their daily lives. More than 1,800 tablets have been found at Vindolanda - the largest collection of Roman writing in the Western Roman Empire – and they have been voted Britain’s greatest archaeological treasure.
This year Vindolanda is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the finding of the first tablets and the insights the writing provides on life on the frontier almost 2,000 years ago. Now the British Museum has launched a research project into how the tablets were made and what links they show between the fort and the wider empire.
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Ink was used to wrote on some of the tablets, while others had a wax surface on which the text was incised. Using scientific techniques, the project seeks to understand their manufacture including the species of wood used, how tablet surfaces were prepared for writing and the composition of the inks.
The project will also assess the present condition of the tablets to ensure their long-term preservation for display and research.
Since the discovery of the first tablets in 1973 during excavations, research has focused on reading surviving traces of writing. But little research has been conducted on the production of the two types of Vindolanda tablets - ink tablets made of thin slivers of wood, rather like postcards, on to which Latin was written in ink using a split nib, and stylus tablets using thicker pieces of wood with a recess for wax, into which writing was inscribed using a point, or stylus.
Little is known about the processes involved in creating, preparing and using these tablets. Using scientific techniques, such as digital microscopy and multispectral imaging, the project will investigate how the tablets were crafted from wood, prepared and written on. It will also reveal connections between Vindolanda and the empire. It is possible that some of the woods or ingredients used to make inks came from distant parts.
The project aims to uncover the preferred species of wood used to make the tablets, the properties that make the woods suitable for making tablets and the source of wood, and whether it was native or from other parts of the Roman Empire. It will also look at how the wood was crafted into tablets, the surface treatments, such as wax, used to prepare the tablets for writing and how the tablets compare to other wooden items discovered at Vindolanda.
The tablets are one of a series of outstanding finds preserved by the ground conditions at Vindolanda, but many more remain buried in the waterlogged or reduced oxygen environments. But these are sensitive to environmental changes and could be lost if they become affected by rapid changes to the climate.
To help the Vindolanda Trust preserve and manage the buried remains, its archaeological team, working with world leading ground monitoring specialists, have installed a series of deep ground probes to measure environmental conditions. If the soil dries out completely, or is subjected to natural drying and re-wetting cycles, the sensitive buried environments can rapidly change, leading to decay and destruction of artefacts.
Organic materials - writing tablets, leather, wood and textiles - would rot before archaeologists can rescue them and even the generally more robust inorganic remains - bone, pottery and metals - would also be badly affected. As the seasons change in the coming years, the monitoring system will provide a picture on what is happening below the ground at Vindolanda.
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