Yesterday the wall gave up more evidence of early life at Epiacum.
Becoming frequent now are the forts main building stones…
The Romans, masters of standardisation had standard shapes for the stones they used to construct forts with. All the stones in most Roman forts were this Triangular shape so that when they got to corners they would fit together nicely to male rounded corners which are stronger than sharp square corners. The face of the stone is square.
Next we are finding roman bricks…
Interestingly many of which (including sandstones) are showing blackening from burning…
This could be as they were part of an oven or hypocaust (underfloor heating). These could come from the Roman baths which have been found on the ramparts (part of the later life of the fort) or the Commandant had underfloor heating… 2,000 years ago.
An Army marches on it’s stomach and a lot of daily activity in and around any settlement in Iron Age, Roman era and Medieval times would have revolved around food.
We are finding an increasing amount of Quern Stones for grinding wheat and other gains into flour.
Two stones would be rotated with the inside faces having carved grooves…
This is a very thin small quern stone. But these…
are much bigger and sturdier.
I wonder if the drystone wall builders in Victorian times had any idea what they were using to build their walls, and just how old these items are?
It is incredible to discover so much material in one dry stone wall. The wall is beating all expectations of everyone involved in operation Jericho.
As you can see, much of the big wall has gone already
Stay tuned to see what new secrets the wall will surrender today…
Good morning. Today is looking good weatherise as dawn breaks over the valley …
Overnight we got some really good questions on social media.
The first was  “Why dismantle the wall if it part of the history?”
An excellent question.
Answer:
The problem with the wall is four-fold.
The first issue is the construction methods and location / situation meant that the wall was dangerous and kept on falling over. The constant repairs were damaging the fort as well. This wouldn’t be a problem in any old field, but because it is on a scheduled monument to which the public have access it has been a long standing safety problem. Coupled this with the fact that because the wall goes directly across the middle of the monument people kept climbing it to get from one side to the other, which was also dangerous.
The next issue was that in order to get from one side of the site to the other, if people didn’t climb the wall, they ended walking over both the ditch system and areas of both archaeological and natural importance.  As the visitor numbers increase these areas were getting severely damaged. Opening up the fort enables access without damage.
Historic England gave permission for the removal of *part* of the wall for archaeological reasons. (We have only removed the parts of the wall necessary – those on top of the fort and left the remaining walls.). Doing this is enabling us to see if we can learn anything about the construction of the wall and about the history of the fort as digging is prohibited.
Lastly the removal of the part of the wall on top of the fort allows people greater appreciation of the scale, siting and construction of the fort. The site is scheduled and protected. It is illegal to dig or to remove anything from the site without permission and oversight from qualified archaeologists. We are preserving the site for future generations.
The second question was “Why is digging prohibited?”
Another good question.
The problem with digging is that it is destructive. Once a site has been dug that’s it. The evidence can’t be reconstructed. So unless digging is going to answer a research question that can’t be answered elsewhere, doing a dig just destroys the archaeology and others evidence we don’t know yet how to get at or even see.
If you think about all the technology we have today that enables us to see things we couldn’t 100 or even 50 years ago. Things like MRI scanners for the body, Radio telescopes for space. Lidar and other technologies to see under the soil…
This means that in all likelihood in the next 50, 100, 1000 years new technologies will enable us to see things we don’t even know exist today.
Now if we destroy that evidence using the primitive technology of today, we are denying future generations the chance of finding things out we can’t at the moment.
So if we preserve it we then give a chance to future generations to learn more with new non-invasive technologies.
There are very strict rules in the UK about where people can and can’t dig for these reasons.
And so onto site and I will do a post soon about some more of the many discoveries from yesterday.
It’s been a good day at Epiacum as more sections of the wall are dismantled and we uncover more and more surprising detail. This will be a two part post as a lot of the wall came down today and we turned up a lot of archaeology as well. The weather was much better which made progress much easier and I don’t have a fireplace full of soaking boots tonight.
As ever the amazing camp staff were up before everyone… preparing, planning, sorting breakfast etc. etc.
It’s a bit early and damp…
But Sam the camp dog (my pooch) is raring to go… I think he has just spotted some sheep… whilst Dale (the mastermind behind much of the operational elements of Operation Jericho, the volunteers and much else) plans the day.
I said there was one find from yesterday I hadn’t covered…
It was this…
Late roman glass found in the wall! Some how this chunk of Roman Glass became part of the wall in or after 1843. Which is strange… but beautiful..
Roman glass
The strange thing about this is that the walls construction is not what was expected. Often the infill (the bit in the middle of a wall) is rubble scrapped up from the area around the wall. In that case the glass would make sense. But… this wall is different. The infill is all stone…
Stone infill
So we suspect a handful of smaller stones must have been scooped up, including this solitary piece of glass, when the wall was built by the victorians about 1,700 years after the fort and glass, was left.
And on to today…
The biggest problem we faced from the start was how to remove the tons and tons of stone from the site without damaging the site. Epiacum is one of the few untouched roman forts around. It is a protected site and one of the trusts primary goals is to preserve and protect the site.
This was the answer….
A tracked dumper truck…
The tracks spread the weight…
of the tons of stones so that only the surface soil is touched and there is hardly any disturbance no matter what the weight of the stone is.
More of the wall fell as we opened up two areas of the wall to dismantling.
We were helped by two ninjas… in section 1
whilst the main team worked from the corner towards them…
Nice view from the office eh? This valley is very special.
The idea is to take the wall down to ground level but leave a small raised area visible as the wall is part of the history of the fort now.
As we got to ground level.
The press turned up…
Reporter interviewing Al Oswald, one of the two primary archaeologists working on Operation Jericho.
Al is from the Archaeology Department at the University of York and brought three undergraduate archaeology students with him.
The other archaeologist, Stewart Ainsworth (of Time Team fame) is Professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of Chester
Both universities have been of immeasurable help with Operational Jericho. Without their help, expertise and generosity this whole project would not have happened.
Todays finds
In this post I will just cover a couple of finds from today. I will detail more in my next post.
So today we found this
stone plug. At the moment there is a discussion about whether it is natural, part of the Roman archaeology, medieval or later…
Then we turned up an interesting part of a roof tile
you can see the square nail hole in the tile…
This is quite likely Roman as can be seen from this example from a museum in Italy…
You can see the square Roman nail in the museum example. In our find from the wall, the hole is square.
Someone, about 2,000 years ago, split a rock to make this tile and shaped this hole to fit the roman nails of the time and it would have been part of a buildings roof within the fort for a few hundred years … and then it turned up in our wall in 2018.
And finally tonight this corner of something…
possibly a trough.
And all this hidden in one dry stone wall!
We also had some other amazing finds… more of which in my next post.
Oh and some locals visited to see what we were up to…
Sam made sure they didn’t get too close
More, much much more in the morning
It’s been a busy day.
Goodnight from Epiacum as we see what new secrets will be revealed tomorrow
After yesterdays deluge the weather is looking better for today – and tomorrow. A chance, hopefully to dry out… however the forecasts can change rapidly around here, which is why so many hill walkers get caught out.
The clouds frame the valley
But things don’t look too good on Thursday and Friday. Let’s see what we can get done today – Fingers crossed.
I am just taking the dry(er) boots back to the troops…
Stay tuned for todays news and finds oh, I forgot one very interesting find yesterday… more about that one shortly…
The day started with an ominous sign. The Northumberland/Cumbrian hills were wearing clouds as the day started…
The clouds frame the valley
Rain was most definitely on the way. Before the volunteers and Archeology students started to break up the wall we had one or two final preparations – marking the features that were obvious so that the removal team could see them at a glance…
Last wall check and marking
as the clouds swirled overhead and the drizzle started…
The walls had been visually inspected and then again with a metal detector – the crosses mark metal readings. The markings relate to defined and specific positions on the wall. Each face has a letter and then divided into 5 meter sections so that finds can be precisely located and reconstructed. Each section of the wall weighs about 16 tons.
Plan
As the demolition team gets to work the rain starts in earnest
The rain from the crew tent!Demolition starts as the rain falls
That penetrating rain that only the North of England can produce.
But the wall falls…
And the finds start..
Roman Fort Column BaseQuern Stone
1900’s bottleFound in two pieces in the wallBuilding detailQuern stones
ThingPlinth stone
And then came the last find of the day…
What is believed to be an Amphora neck shard…
We didn’t expect to make much progress today but a large portion of the wall fell and some brilliant finds were made.
I am now drying some of the teams boots (I live close by) over the stove…
Boots drying
whilst the kitchen does its stuff and feeds the workers
An amazing, if a tad damp, first day…
At the end of this day as the clouds (and the rain) head away over the hills a job well done…
