Tales from the Trowel - Inside the MAGNA Project's Roman Army Museum

In this captivating episode, Jackie and Sarah journey to the borders of Northumberland, to the Roman Army Museum - Magna!

Hear incredible insights from activity and diversity officer Sophie and senior archaeologist Rachel, key members of the Project.

 

 

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Now from Archaeology News North East, the latest archaeology news and interviews from around the UK.
This is Tales from the Trowel with Jackie and Sarah.
Welcome back everybody to Tales from the Trowel. I'm Sarah.
I'm Jackie. Today we're at the
Roman Army Museum in just about in Northumberland. Yes, Rachel and Sophie.

(00:25):
So Sophie, can you tell us a little bit about what your job is here at the museum?
Yeah, absolutely. So I work as the Activity and Diversity Officer,
so part of the MAGNA project, which is really kindly funded by the National
Lottery Heritage Fund and all of the lottery players,
meaning that we are able to work for the next five years to really widen our
engagement with the public and get everyone really excited about the archaeology,

(00:49):
the history, heritage and culture that we're finding here at MAGNA.
And my role is to bring it to those audiences get them excited and let everyone
know that archaeology and history is for everyone it's for all.
Amazing and what about you Rachel what's your job?
So I'm the senior archaeologist for the Magna Project so I find all of the things
for Sophie to then go and tell everyone about and get everyone excited about

(01:13):
so in the summers we excavate from from April to September.
So during then, you can find me out in the field in most weathers.
Not all, we do draw a line somewhere, but out in the fields leading the excavations
with our wonderfully dedicated team of volunteers that come and excavate with us.
And in the winter, we then flip over and go into sort of research mode and start

(01:37):
actually working out what we
found because everything goes a mile a minute on the digs in the summer.
So having time to sit down and work out everything, do the research behind the
scenes so as when we reopen...
We've got a full pack of information on what we found and if any of that feeds
into Sophie's work, we can sort of hand that over and let her lead really exciting, excellent events.

(02:02):
So was 2023 the first year of the Magna dig?
Yes. So the project officially got underway July 3rd, which was when we opened the excavations.
So that was day one, year one. and we
are restarting on April 1st this year for year two going
back into the same area of the site to

(02:22):
sort of finish off and continue working currently we're excavating
mile castle 46 on Hadrian's wall right the
eastern half of it we don't have the western half so we can't excavate the western
half of it but having only half is not slowing us down or hindering us we're
still finding lots of really interesting and unusual things to chew over so

(02:43):
I was reading that the The Magna project has begun because of the effects of climate change.
Can you sort of explain what's been happening out in the fields?
Yes. So Magna is a very wet landscape. There's a reason we're inside the museum
at the moment and not on the site today.
And actually a large part of the field is a bog, a peat bog.

(03:03):
The peat bog used to be a lot larger than it currently is. It's been shrinking and drying out.
And one of the ways this has become really obvious is there's actually
some mystery archaeology rising out of the fields
so two features that we're targeting in the
next couple of years of excavations weren't visible
a decade ago the field was completely level around
them you never would have spotted them and one of

(03:26):
them sort of well complex is now standing about a
meter proud of the surrounding fields and this is
just because of the peat bog drying out and shrinking
through damage of climate change and the sort of increasingly hot.
Summers and big spells of drought that we're getting which are not typical
for this part of england much the same
as the northeast it's a fairly damp environment or it

(03:48):
should be it's also
been quite a surprise to have everything so it's kind of the p.o you're
aware that things are there beforehand i mean we obviously
knew there was archaeology here the the fort platform has
always been visible so the the site that we're excavating
is across two fields and one of them is dominated by sort of
large square raised platform that is the outline of the

(04:09):
the old fort and that's always been
visible so we knew there was archaeology in the region and obviously
the line of hadrian's wall is pretty well documented at
this point but what lay in the space in between
the two of them was a little bit more up for debate and interpretation we knew
we had the valum sort of southern defensive ditch and the mile castle but that

(04:30):
was kind of it and now in this between space is where all of these features
are starting to pop out and raising questions about, are these Roman?
Are they not Roman? Are they to do with the occupation of the land after the Roman occupation?
That we're in right now used to be a working farm called Carvoran Farm.

(04:51):
So do these features relate to the use of the farm or are they related to the fort?
So that's sort of the other reason we're going in to excavate them,
not just because of the potential impact of climate change, but also to see, well, what are they?
Now that we've spotted them, we kind of want to know what they are.
Yeah, to relate it to everything else around it. Yeah, exactly.

(05:12):
So over at Vindalundra, I think, am I right in saying There's like nine levels
of archaeology over there.
So is this what you're hoping to do, to give a bit more of a story to this area?
Yes. So Magnafort has been minimally investigated for a fort on Hadrian's Wall
compared to a lot of the others.
You know, Bird Oswald is the next fort west of us and forts like Housesteads

(05:35):
further east of Vindolanda.
And obviously Vindolanda, we've been excavating continuously since 1970.
This was quite a bit of research been done over there. We don't know how many
forts there are at Magna. We know there will be multiple.
Magna was built before Hadrian's Wall to guard the Roman road called the Stain Gate.
So there should be multiple forts stacked one on top of the other,

(06:00):
but how many is still up for debate.
We will hopefully find out by the end of the project.
So one of the goals is to dig through all of them. I was going to ask about
the aims of the project what do you hope to achieve by the end of it?
We're hoping to effectively create a transact through the site's archaeology

(06:20):
from north to south so we're starting up at the northern corner of the land
in Milecastle 46 and then digging our way south,
we're digging across the Valham and across the mystery features there's a set
of ditches and then the well that have popped up and then we're digging the
northern defensive ditches of the fort itself, and then the southwest quadrant of the fort.

(06:43):
So we'll create this really nice slice through the whole site landscape and
across all the different types of archaeology that we have to sort of,
not only better understand Magnafort, but better understand it in its frontier context.
Then with the climate change aspect, we want to see how that's impacted.
We obviously have the visual anecdotal evidence, if you will,

(07:05):
in the field with the peat bog, but we don't know what it's doing to the underground
archaeology, for example, in the fort.
Being able to excavate a big quadrant of the fort and get down into the archaeology
and then understand, okay, okay, it's in this state because of these climate impacts.
And then that can inform our management of the landscape and the site going

(07:26):
forward, try and preserve it as best as we can.
And you've been working with Teesside University on doing some sampling.
Yes. So we worked with Dr. Gillian Taylor at Teesside University on a lot of
the chemical analysis and monitoring that we're doing.
So we have a probe array in the field just behind us,

(07:47):
which is attached to a weather station as well and that continually monitors
a whole variety of underground conditions in
the soil as well as recording the weather so we can then
pair up weather events like all of these huge storms
we've been having with changing levels under the
ground whether that's in the ph or the electrical
conductivity of the soil or underground temperature

(08:09):
as well all of these things can be impacted so working
with Gillian on that aspect of
the project and also pxrf sampling
so portable x-ray fluorescence which can
tell you about the chemical components and trace elements in the soil which
can then inform site formation processes or occupation patterns uses of certain

(08:34):
features so has anything come out of that yet have you got any results but we're
still working our way through the samples in the lab we've got some preliminary maps,
sort of heat maps of chemical traces that sort of broadly align with what we
would expect for the site formation.
For example, up in the Milecastle Trench, the northwest corner of the trench
is a natural hollow in the landscape.

(08:55):
And so a lot of the sort of background chemical elements you'd have in the ground,
calcium, for example, are really concentrated there because because that's where
all of the silt and the soil build-up is getting washed.
So the heat maps for the archaeological layers are still in process.
There was over 150 PXRF samples, I think, from this summer.

(09:21):
So they're working their way through them and sort of pulling all of the data together.
There's going to be a lot of information coming out when it comes out,
whereas a lot of sampling.
Which is so important because it gives people the opportunity to find out more
and sort of look into that research, understand the site.

(09:43):
And, you know, as much as we can, making everything accessible to everyone,
getting people up on site, seeing things for themselves, you know,
getting that connection with the landscape and really understanding how it's
changing is really important as well.
I mean, you look out of the window and it's very quiet, you know,
and you've got to take yourself back in your mind to just how busy and,

(10:06):
you know, how much industry, you know, servicing was going on.
And it's just not what you see when you look out the window.
You really do have to use your archaeological imagination and try and rebuild
the environment, which from your sampling helps to do that.
Yeah, so both the PXRF, but also bulk soil samples that we're taking as well,

(10:30):
we can then process those to extract pollen, seeds, grains,
and particularly pollen and seeds will help us understand what plant life basically
was around us, whether it was heavily forested or wetter than it currently is,
just sort of see what was growing.
And then that can help you build a picture and

(10:51):
when visitors come in we can sort of tell them okay well
you're looking out the window or you're standing on the site and currently
it's a sort of fallow grassy field with some big wet patches and some reeds
but actually two thousand years ago there would have been little copse of trees
over there or a big reed bed in the edge of a lake down there and build the

(11:14):
picture back up for them,
put them back into the Roman landscape.
Try and help them visualise the buildings that would have been here as well.
There's not much left of the Myall Castle, unfortunately, so poor Sophie's had
the mean job last summer of trying to explain this big square of stones is actually

(11:36):
something really exciting.
The most common question was, it just looks like a pile of rocks.
So what was the Myall Castle? So every Roman mile along Hadrian's Wall,
you're going to get a fortified building called a
mile castle it would have been manned by
six to eight roman soldiers um our
mile castle my castle 46 is interesting a

(11:59):
little bit unique in the fact that it's so close to magna fort
it's within walking distance most of the mile castles
aren't they're more isolated along the wall so we
would have had shifts of soldiers going up to
man man the mile castle rather than staying there overnight
so we haven't found evidence yet of any barrack blocks
or any kind of occupation of that sense you're taking

(12:20):
your packed lunch up you're doing your shift and you're coming coming back to
the fort again so that would have been its purpose it
would have been to monitor Hadrian's Wall keep those
pesky Scots away and as well
what we've been researching and looking into this year
is how the Marle Castle at Magna number 46
was a trading centre so it was a

(12:42):
way to create a sort of uneasy peace with those living north
of the wall trading goods coming from the roman empire out
and then accessing things like scottish gold which
the romans would have been keen to get their hands on so it would
have been not an impermeable border but a
border control point that's what it would.
Have functioned as which is really exciting you know it

(13:03):
adds that other dimension that flavor to military life it's
not all about those battles yeah it's
about the daily life of the soldier on the frontier here acting
as essentially border control there's a misconception is
that with hadrian's warm kind of it was built as
a like a bucket stock yes anything but there was
quite a lot of movement and might say trade yeah and

(13:25):
taxation as well yeah people travel and i think the roman empire is expansive
and expensive you're going to want to start to charge people to access it that's
how you're going to make a lot of money and you know the where hadrian's wall
situates in the landscape it was always a sort of transient.
Landscape in itself prior to the wall it wouldn't have

(13:47):
changed that you know quickly as soon as the
wall comes up you know you're going to get a lot of pushback you're
going to want to be able to facilitate movement throughout the wall otherwise
it's going to be such a difficult job for your army to defend that frontier
so that would have been some of the kind of concessions that they would have
made there is a lot of ongoing research currently particularly on the scottish side of the wall,

(14:11):
I think, into what communities were divided, what impact the construction of
the wall had, because obviously there were pre-existing groups living in this area,
family groups, larger tribal population setups.
The line of Hadrian's Wall in the Roman Empire did not necessarily respect their boundaries,

(14:32):
so there is more research now and people
are starting to think about that aspect of the wall into well
what happens if your parents
live on one side of the wall and you live on
the other you know you moved away to start up your own farmstead in
the iron age and then suddenly the romans come
and put this massive great big wall between the two and it's you know not even

(14:55):
on like a large scale even on a very small sort of family scale if suddenly
familial units are split yeah by this wall being constructed through the through
the middle is definitely something people are focusing on more now and thinking about more and,
like Sophie said, Padrian's Wall was never a sort of hard impermeable border.
Every mile castle has a north gate. Some of them are very mind-bogglingly situated

(15:20):
once you go further east of here onto the Windsill Ridge.
There is at least one mile castle where the north gate opens onto a sheer cliff
drop which is not exactly a sensible border crossing point.
The Romans are predictable if they say they'll build a mile castle with a north
gate every mile on the wall, they build a mile castle with a north gate every

(15:42):
mile on the wall, even if that means you have to jump off a cliff.
So yeah it was always it's actually the skydiving team yes roman power troopers
yeah so do we know much about the communities on the other side of the wall.
We can not today maybe today if the weather continues to improve we can see

(16:07):
the local iron age hill fort for the northern communities actually in dunfries
and galloway near lockerby,
Burnswork, Iron Age hill fort on a clear day you can see all the way from Magna
to that hill fort so you have a visual link to the northern communities,
we know that the tribes based in this region didn't necessarily love the Romans

(16:29):
they were not necessarily their biggest fans,
unlike some of the other tribes in Iron Age Britain that became sort of client
kingdoms first pre the Roman conquest or very early on in the Roman conquest of Britain Britain,
they were never particularly interested other than what they could get out of
the Roman army and the Roman Empire.

(16:49):
The trade networks that Sophie was mentioning over the course of the Roman occupation
of Britain, they have to send increasing amounts of Roman silver north because
it's that thing of you always want what you don't have in Scotland.
We have natural gold resources but not silver.
Obviously, for the Scottish nobility
in the the tribal communities it was silver was a status symbol that's what

(17:13):
they wanted and they could get that from the romans so they start trading with
the romans but then they get greedy and sort of threaten attacks and raids and
causing trouble so the romans have to send more and more silver to try and placate
their neighbors because they don't want to deal with an incursion.
Eventually it fails as the whole sort of
roman occupation of britain fails and the wall

(17:35):
falls not literally necessarily but it
no longer becomes a defended frontier and
yeah it goes back into chaos we
talk about the English side of war this is
yeah that it kind of it stops there it's a barrier in
that sense there's where people on the other side
there was that movement there was right up into

(17:56):
Scotland I mean I remember there was one so we found I
think it was Aberdeenshire yeah I remember there was a bit of a
horde down there as soon as they get there and I remember at the time when I
read that because this was of going back some years and I'm thinking what was
it going back you stopped you felt yeah oh no well you passed that but it did
and like we say it's highly dynamic and a lot of trade happening and one of

(18:17):
the aspects of Hadrian's War in a way that isn't discussed as much.
Is the war itself and it is
that movement it's a dynamic and it's a diverse part of
the roman empire you know we were having the roman
army were sending people from all over the empire to
come and defend this frontier as well so you're getting that
real mixing part of trade coming from across the empire and people as well bringing

(18:42):
different cultures different traditions languages so it It wasn't just your
sort of stereotypical Roman soldier standing on a wall. Nothing comes in.
It's movement and, yeah, Dinosaurism.
Also, the Hadrian's Wall wasn't always, rather, the final frontier, as it were.

(19:06):
Within 50 years of Hadrian's Wall being built, Antonine is building his wall
across the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde in Scotland.
And he pushes, that's his step, Hadrian's big declaration as emperor is I am
going to define and defend the borders of my land which is not sort of typical
for Roman emperors generally up until that point the way that they stake their,

(19:28):
claim and proclaim their,
competence I guess to be an emperor is by going and conquering a new place and
Hadrian does something quite different and he says no I'm going to define the
land we've already taken and secure it.
Antonine does not Antoninus Pinus is not so interested in that and he decides
to go and conquer the next chunk of Britain and takes Lowland,

(19:51):
Scotland, all the way up to sort of modern-day Edinburgh and Glasgow and builds
the Antonine Wall across there.
So once that starts happening, Hadrian's Wall isn't even the end of the Roman
Empire, it's just a sort of backup defensive line.
And so there were Roman forts and road networks and communities in southern
Scotland for a few decades. Unfortunately, Antonine Wall doesn't last.

(20:15):
Well, fortunately, unfortunately, depending on your perspective on the conquest of Scotland.
It was constructed quite differently,
wasn't it? Yes, so it was only ever constructed out of turf and timber.
So Hadrian's Wall is quite famously, I think, made of stone and still standing
in chunks. that you can go and walk along.
The Antonine Wall was a turf and timber defensive line. There were distance

(20:38):
slabs that were stoned that were set into it.
Which we have almost all of them. A couple have been destroyed through time
and history, but the majority of them are in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow.
And all the different legions that built the different chunks put up their distance
slab to say, I, Flavius, commander of the 9th Legion, built so many hundred

(20:58):
metres of wall with my men to defend the Roman frontier.
But it was never quite so permanent and southern Scotland was never quite so
easily subdued and subsumed into the Empire.
They couldn't quite get a foothold and so the Antonine Wall is kind of,
in some regards, a failed expansion.

(21:19):
They withdraw back. They sort of go, no, this hasn't really worked out.
They re-defend Hadrian's Wall. They sort of refurbish it because it wasn't the frontier.
No one was really looking after it for a while and so they have to come back
and re-fortify it and patch up all the bits where maybe some stones have come
loose or the roads aren't very good anymore and then reoccupy it and give up

(21:42):
on Scotland as it were other than brief military forays.
In the third century Emperor Septimus Severus decides to have a go as well and
goes on a very brutal campaign north but never tries to push the frontier he
bases himself on Hadrian's Wall and just attacks north into Scotland and has a go at them.

(22:06):
That's a sound more like a sport but,
yeah i think it's just a sort of proof of points yeah i did he comes from a
military background as an emperor so he goes off on his military campaign yes
technical training yeah,
i think by that point they've been having some trouble with the locals so he's like right i'm
to go teach them a lesson so sophie

(22:29):
how do you get all of this information and get
it out there how do you make it accessible and diverse to the people
of northern belgium yeah totally so we've got a really extensive activities
and events program so we will theme it around the things that are coming out
of the excavations and we'll pick up little chunks that we're able to speak

(22:51):
to people about multi-generational visitors, all of our audiences,
sort of current and new, we'll pick things out for them and we'll just distill it down into questions.
What is important what narrative does
this tell us and how can it be related to
that person that's engaging with us we've got

(23:12):
so much information on our website kind of
current research and further things that people can
go and talk and learn more about there's that
real layered interpretation that we've got throughout the
summer we've got daily trench talks so people can
come up on site have a look at the live excavations ask
any questions like what is that big pile of rocks we'll

(23:34):
tell you and we'll give you a bit of a flavor and contextualize.
That and bring that story and that narrative is what's most important to
everyone but we're absolutely delighted this year
that we're having a brand new activity center built it's going
to give you stunning panoramic views of Magnafort itself and
we're launching accessible trench talks from there from the
end of april so those that can't make it across the field

(23:56):
can come and see an interactive map of the
exhibition talk to our some of our
fantastic volunteers to myself and get
that flavor of what we're actually doing live as
well as some fab family-friendly activities you
know teddy bear's picnic bring your teddy bear dresses yamper and
it's coming up and things like that so it's just about making

(24:19):
it accessible on lots in
in the broadest sense of the word to our visitors in
that way yeah we get some very very cute children for teddy bears picnic they're
they're great i also can't remember what was the day of the teddy bears picnic
but we did have a wee boy who came up to site in costume dressed as a roman
soldier yes and was like with the confidence of of a small child,

(24:43):
came up and introduced himself to me as the ghost of a Roman soldier from Magna.
And I was just like... You should have asked him what was going on.
Like, can you explain what on earth you guys were doing and why this is here, please?
I was going to say, it's sort of 1,600 years since the Romans left.
How do you inspire the next generation, like children coming up,

(25:06):
to be interested in this?
What do you do to to sort of
inspire them like the the next generation i think
children are fantastic because they've got wild imaginations so
it's about sort of letting them know how they
can make a personal connection to an item so we played a fabulous game in the

(25:27):
october half term just gone called trickle trade we're trading up here at mile
castle we were getting the children that were coming in to trade an object that
they found in the museum for a prize and getting them excited.
And then we can engage them and talk to them about, okay, so what you've just done.
Without us is what the Romans would have done here and you're trying

(25:49):
to make that personal medium and personal connection to
them we're doing some fantastic work currently with
two sixth formers from the northeast on our
youth panel and we're looking at the impact of climate change
in archaeology so history and archaeology underpins a lot of what we understand
about society and culture so we're able to link that to whatever people are

(26:15):
interested in and kind of draw them in on that and you know dressing up doesn't hurt either.
Give give give someone a helmet
and a sword and they're pretty into it and that's not the kids yeah so you know
the staff i would like to say sophie made an excellent roman oracle for the

(26:37):
trade event um she had her full costume on for the week.
No it was good fun but it's it's just about finding what
hooks that that person in and with
kids it's usually imagination and it's getting them doing something
and then you know kind of going on from there so yeah get them hooked on yes

(26:58):
exactly because you know you get that classic thing oh i'm not interested in
history yeah everything you do we know about and can do because of history so
there'll be a hook and we'll find it,
i mean if you get too young enough you end up like me become an archaeologist,

(27:20):
those questions people normally ask me is like oh how did you get interested
in this how did you start doing this and i'm always like um good question i
don't think i ever wasn't interested interested, but I grew up in East Lothian, South East Scotland.
There is a lot of castles in South East Scotland because it's the prime raiding
route for the English kings, things like the Ruff-Woo-ing.

(27:45):
For American to Scots hand and just generally the
the border wars of centuries between Scotland and England
it's one of the primary routes in towards Edinburgh so there's
a lot of castles where I grew up and it was a really easy place to
take an energetic outdoorsy child to
go run and climb things and
get interested and I think that's okay it's

(28:07):
the only sort of thing I can pinpoint is where
it probably started is just growing up surrounded by history and
not being forced to take
it too seriously necessarily just being able to go out and explore and
then oh look now she's interested oh now
she's really interested oh this has clearly become
a decision for her life and you

(28:29):
know i now spend it outside in fields yeah less
running site health and safety takes precedent
less running around but still climbing on things
still finding things still trying to figure it
yeah oh definitely i
think keeping the excitement going for both like the visitors that come to us

(28:50):
with sophie's work but also with the volunteers that's a big part of can be
a big part of my job yes i'm here for the the technical side of things is the
professional if you like on on site but But I'm also here for the excitement.
I get just as excited about stuff as the volunteers do.
And I think that really helps in sort of showing them that it's okay to get

(29:12):
this excited, but also like this is a genuinely exciting discovery.
I mean, when the person running the dig or the person who does this all day
every day for a living is just as excited as you are, I think that really helps
with engagement and sort of proving to people that this is interesting and exciting.
Sighting they can really pick up on your energy the day

(29:33):
we found hadrian's wall in the trench i was dancing on
the spot in front of all of my volunteers and i did
not care because i didn't think it was in the second last week of the dig last
season i didn't think we were going to get any of hadrian's wall the this section
that runs past our site has been really really heavily stone rolled in medieval

(29:54):
and post-medieval periods to build surrounding farms castles field walls walls, all sorts.
So if you go up onto the Hadrian's Wall path that runs past their site, you can't see any of it.
You can see the little mounds of rubble left behind the stone that they didn't want and that's it.
And then suddenly someone's like, oh, I've got these interesting stones that seem to be lined up.

(30:16):
And I'm like, okay, we've got two of them so far. Don't you need three to make a wall? Yeah.
One stone is a stone, two stones are a coincidence, and three stones is a wall.
And I came back like half an hour later and he now had four stones and I was
like yes we've done it we've got it and I think we ended up with six stones six stones total of.

(30:37):
Doesn't sound like much given the scale of Hadrian's Wall and the
state it survives in elsewhere but when you
spent 10 weeks out of 12 yeah telling people it
was there we just don't have it anymore to now
be able to say we do have it we can prove the line of
it we can that then let us figure out exactly where
the north gate for our mile castle was we could find the end of
Hadrian's Wall where it stopped and met the road and all

(31:00):
it just sort of yeah it added that extra bit to
the interpretation of the mile castle to the story that we could we
could tell people and get people excited about but
i think yeah watching me do a little celebratory dance in the
middle of the trench you know what's going yeah can i just go back to what you're
saying about volunteers yeah if somebody came along and they'd never done any

(31:22):
archaeology before they'd never been on an archaeological site what what do
you do with them like like to show them what to do if they've got no experience at all?
I mean, we can always start with someone that's never had any archaeological experience. Myself?
Yes, Sophie came and joined us. I had no archaeological experience before I
started with the Vindolanda Trust and then I spent three days on the dig.

(31:46):
You know, I am that person.
Threatened to stage a coup for my job at one point when she had her star find.
And then the rain came and I rescinded that.
Oh, tell me about this star find. i'm interested oh it
didn't it unfortunately didn't survive conservation you know
again pulling back to that climate of climate change

(32:08):
affecting the archaeology you know we're not
having the capacity to get these exceptionally well preserved objects
coming out of the ground anymore because they're not
in the right condition so that is a fantastic example
of that and it was a way for me to see that up close
literally firsthand seeing how
an object that could have been really exciting was unable

(32:29):
to go through conservation because it cannot tell us that
story what we're looking for is that narrative and that
understanding and it and we couldn't get
get it from that but i'd never i'd never dug i got
i got the knee mat out i got the the brush
and the trail and i had to go and you know
observe watching rachel and our
colleague frankie as well on the project you get this wide

(32:52):
range of volunteers and we bring them in and
they're all so supportive of one another those that have done it professionally
those that have done it for a really long time with the trust which is fantastic
the fact we have people coming back year on year is amazing and they're able
to provide that support as well as the team here as well biscuits yes.

(33:16):
If you've never done archaeology before we will start from point zero with you
this is how you you hold a trowel, this is how you dig cobbles.
I mean, even with some of our really experienced excavators,
As I think Sophie mentioned earlier,
Magna is primarily cobbles and if not cobbles, big piles of rocks.
Some of the volunteers that have excavated with the Trust for years before had

(33:38):
never excavated cobbled surfaces.
So we had to go back to day one with them as well.
And sort of, I'm always happy to get down in the trench with the volunteers and dig.
I am an archaeologist because I like doing the digging side of my job.
So if I'm a volunteer and I come along, I basically just need to bring my enthusiasm with me.
I don't need any tools. and your waterproofs yes

(34:00):
we cannot provide
you with the the clothing gear so boots
sensible footwear clothing for
all weather conditions because we can go from 25 degrees and
sunny to five degrees and wet in the space of maybe not quite
a day but overnight and everything in between that
so as long as you bring your sort of your personal kit outdoor wear and sensible

(34:24):
shoes along with you we have trowels brushes scoops shovels everything some
people that have been doing it for ages have their own stuff that they bring
with them and that's great they have their they have formed the archaeologists
personal attachment to their travel.
I am extremely personally attached to mine i'm still
on travel number one it's been going for over a decade now and i

(34:46):
if anything ever happened to that travel i think i would cry but we
have all of the kit you just need to bring yourself good outdoor
clothes and enthusiasm and we will take you
through it all and like Sophie said we have so many volunteers who've
been excavating the trust with the trust for years and years
decades some of them so they're always
happy to pair up and we try and

(35:08):
spread the group out we know who hasn't excavated before before
they come and sort of intermingle everyone so as if you're a complete newbie
you'll be digging close to someone who's done it before yeah um so what about
like the oldest and the youngest volunteers that you've got we do get octogenarians
that come along some of them are definitely fitter than myself,

(35:30):
and we get people as young as you know 16 coming on the dig as well that's the
youngest that we are able to accept as volunteers with the trust and they've
got to come along with someone over at the age of 18, but we get a complete range.
As long as you can get in the trench and most importantly, get back out of it,
then you can come and dig.
So how do volunteers get in contact?

(35:53):
What's the process of them contacting you and auditors?
Head to the Vindolanda Trust website. Booking spaces for the 2024 excavation
season are completely sold out, which is incredible.
We've got hundreds of volunteers who are coming to engage with us,
but it will be at the end of this year, end of 2024, that the spaces for Digging 2025 will go live.

(36:18):
It's a bit like the glass debris of the archaeology world. Get on the website.
Have a look. There's tons of information on there. That's how you book.
But if you can't get on to dig and you want to come and
get involved with us before next year you can come
and volunteer to be one of our guides so imparting those
stories and that narrative and those experiences to
members of the public come and support us some of

(36:40):
our activities as well if you like dressing up come and
speak to myself and so
that's like another way that you can get involved in that all via our
website or pop in and see us or become a friend
of Vindolanda you get unlimited access for the whole
of the year you get friends reports you get invited to
special events that we put on exclusively for our friends and

(37:03):
a community of people that all share the same
passions that you have so there's lots of different ways that
we can uh we can chat to you so when
you've closed and over the winter like we've just had
now is when you're saying about the research and the
post-excavation things happen yes so could
you tell us a little bit about that post-excavation runs through the

(37:23):
summer as well it runs parallel to the excavations
along with the wonderful new
activity center the second half of that building that's getting constructed at
the moment is going to be our excavation center for our
volunteers to use so during the summer when they're on their lunch breaks tea
breaks that's where the all-important biscuit supply is going to be and you

(37:44):
know teas coffees somewhere to either sunbathe on the deck outside if it's nice
or or shelter from the rain inside if it's a bit more like today.
That's also where we run our post decks as well so we have
an in-house pottery specialist dr christina
krispasan who will be running post decks

(38:04):
with our volunteers we sort of rotate people off the dig so as they can see
that side of the project as well and frankie our colleague who does the geoarchaeology
and the environmental archaeology for the magna project she will be also handling
the soil samples that we take with the volunteers in there so post decks runs
through through the summer.
If you come to volunteer with us, you don't just see the digging site.

(38:27):
You get to do some fines washing and categorizing, some soil sample processing.
And then in the winter, any of that that's not finished, we obviously finish
off with the help of some lovely volunteers in the museum.
And then we just start going through it.
I definitely currently have an easier job of that compared to our colleagues over at Vindolanda.

(38:49):
They produce use significantly more context
and material culture at the moment i think it's only going to ramp up at magna
we started at one of the sort of lower density occupation parts of the site
in the mile castle where especially since we don't have a barrack block people
just seem to be coming up for short periods of time and we're working our way

(39:10):
back in towards the fort and we end up in,
commanding officer's house and however many of them that there are one on top
of the other so So by the end of the project, I will have the same hundreds
and hundreds of contexts and tens of thousands of shards of pottery to look at.
But we sort of work through all of this material in the winter.

(39:31):
Christine, obviously, as the pottery specialist, deals with the pottery,
all of our small finds and glass objects, metal artefacts, go to our curator.
Barbara and she sort of puts those
through conservation hopefully they survive but not always sometimes
and they go into the main sort of

(39:52):
vindalanda collection database and storage
and if there's any sort of key artifacts or discoveries from the summer excavations
that's when we can really hone in on those for research as well as more general
interim reports on the sort of the The technical version of what I did with
my summer, basically, is what I write a lot of.

(40:14):
So what's the most interesting thing that's come out from Magnus so far?
Interesting for me or interesting for the general public?
Well, I always get asked, have you found any treasure?
And I think treasure is subjective. You know, what's precious to me could be
a fingerprint, you know, in a piece of ceramic. But, you know,

(40:35):
people want gold, you know, that they're looking for real rings and,
you know, proper treasure.
But what would you say is like the most interesting thing that's come out?
Well, no treasure so far. I think the structural evidence of the Myall Castle
is really interesting in telling its specific story.
The dimensions of the internal space tell us it's one of the largest Myall Castles on the wall. Yeah.

(41:00):
The width of the wall tells us it's one of the earliest parts of Hadrian's Wall
that's been constructed.
It matches with the width of the earliest sections of Hadrian's Wall.
As with all big infrastructure projects, they change their mind halfway through
building it and they narrow the wall.
So you have the really inventively named broad wall and narrow wall construction
phases. And our mile castle walls align with broad wall construction.

(41:23):
So just even these really small details, really boring things on site is like
taking a measurement of how wide is the wall.
Suddenly tells you oh this is one of the
earliest bits that they built why were they why was this a priority and
oh this matches up with the two neighboring mile
castles are also two of the largest mile castles on the wall so ours seems to
be similar and sort of form a set with them and so on a very sort of boring

(41:49):
as you know some people might think of the archaeological side of things that's
actually telling us a lot about the mile castle that wouldn't immediately be obvious.
Artifact wise, we had a really, really lovely dual balance beam that was found
quite early on in the dig.
It's one of only 14 found so far in the UK.

(42:10):
And it seems to be a particularly sort of high quality example.
It's got silver insets in one of the arms. So it would have been used for as a weighing instrument.
This is why it sort of ties into the trade story and and why we started to build
a narrative around the trade at the Mile Castle.
So it looks kind of like a sort of set of hanging scales would,

(42:31):
but it has these silver dots down one arm, which would have allowed you to slide
a weight along the scale and change the balance point, depending each silver
dot marks a known sort of increment for weight.
So you could either use it just with two pans hung off the end of each arm,
arm, or you could slide this weight along the arm and sort of change.

(42:53):
Balance and that's been a really unusual object came out the ground in
stunning condition i don't know how stratigraphically it
was quite high up which generally means preservation will be
worse the closer you are to the topsoil which is
the most sort of oxygenated bacterially active part
of any site the worst preservation is going to be
somehow this object came out just looking like it

(43:15):
needed a quick bath you could see the silver inset straight
away from pulling it out the ground and all of the
detail of the little loops at the end of the arm
and the suspension hook in the middle it was all there and I
am sure it got more than just a clean but to a non-conservators perspective
I was like you know it's not corroded it's not deformed by corrosion it turned

(43:37):
green because it's copper alloy and that's what that does but otherwise just
you could immediately recognize it So is this going to go on display in the museum?
Not this year, but hopefully in the coming years we're going to build a magna
gallery space or case in the museum as we find more things and as we have more of a story to tell.

(43:59):
We'll get that. Oh, that's going to be interesting watching that grow as you
find more things. Yeah. Hopefully.
Yes. Touch wood.
Yeah so there's there's been lots of things sort of from the more
from the treasure aspect through to the structural and then
we also found a grave and found a

(44:20):
kissed grave on site as well which is very unusual for hadrian's
wall there's only half a dozen
or so other examples of burials at mile castles
are on the line of the wall itself it's not
a very typical burial location for romans
so there's a lot of research going
on behind the scenes into the skeleton to

(44:42):
learn as much as we can about the person and why
they were buried there sarah's the bones as soon
as you said yeah no it
was a very entertaining day on site i sort

(45:02):
of saw a gaggle of volunteers had formed and that normally
means something's been that always means something's come up and then
i looked at who was in it specifically in that
period we had a cohort of forensic archaeology
and anthropology students that had just finished their masters this was their
reward to themselves to go and come on the dig with us and they were all there
and i was like okay there's not just a gaggle there's a gaggle of bones people

(45:26):
very much we weren't expecting a body given it's a non-typical called Burial Location.
So I then go over to see a pair of likes and I'm like, oh, okay, that's a person.
I need to go make some phone calls.

(45:47):
Yeah. Well, I think we just had to hit critical mass of bone specialists.
Yeah. Before one appears. Yeah.
We had enough of them all of a sudden on site that it just attracted a skeleton.
That's fantastic. So how long are you expecting the research on?
I am waiting to hear back from Durham. So we work with Durham University for

(46:13):
our skeletal analysis. analysis.
The remains have obviously been exhumed from site. That was done during the summer.
The discovery was kept completely under wraps until the excavation had closed
just to prevent any interference.
It is now just a damp hole where the body used to be.
So they've been exhumed and gone off to the lab for visual skeletal analysis, but also,

(46:36):
scientific testing to confirm things like the sex of the individual and diet,
place of origin and also radiocarbon dates.
Radiocarbon dates will probably take the longest out of those things.
Hopefully in the next few months we'll have answers from some of the other scientific
tests and we'll be able to tell a little bit more about them than what we currently have.

(46:58):
But we'll have to watch this space. Yeah, it's exciting things to come. Yeah.
There's always something. There's always at least one thing going on.
Normally at least five things going on back of house that we're collaborating
with specialist researchers either in-house or at other academic institutions
to sort of pull together and tell as big of a story as we possibly can as complete

(47:22):
a story as we possibly can about the site exciting.
Oh, I've got plenty of those. If you want mysteries.
Like every other thing last summer was like, oh, why is that there?
First it was, oh, there's no barracks. There should be. Where were they living?

(47:44):
Where were they sleeping?
Especially for a large mile castle. So the best example of a large mile castle
that you could go and visit is Mile Castle 48 or Poultrossburn is its sort of
name in the village of Galesland which is just a couple of miles west well,
two Roman miles west we're at 46, it's 48,

(48:04):
two miles west and it's largest or second largest I think it's the largest on the wall,
And it's sort of got very good upstanding remains excavated by the Victorians
when they were blasting the railway line through the Carlisle to Newcastle railway.
They missed the mile castle, but dug it up while they were there.

(48:25):
So it's all excavated and you can see, and it's got the footprint of its two barrack blocks inside.
So generally the larger ones have not just one barrack block inside,
they have two so they can accommodate more men rather than just maybe six to
eight, ten, but maybe up to even 30 people could live in a mile castle of that.
Of that scale with that double barrack block system.

(48:45):
So for a large metal castle to not have any evidence of one in the half that
we're excavating is maybe a little bit unusual.
I obviously can't say what's in the western half. There could be a miraculous
double height barrack block over there for all I know, but currently we have no buildings.
I was expecting a building here.
No building, okay. Must have just been a quiet area.

(49:09):
Less trouble in the city.
It's like okay nowhere for them to live that's fine and then we find a well
where there should have been a building I'm like okay,
that's not normal they don't normally build wells inside castle why is this
here they're not exactly short of water supply they're next to an ancient lake.

(49:29):
So yeah there's been an ongoing list of mysteries,
all summer we've been able to really track our
sort of experiences through our dig diary on the roman
army museum website so it keeps you
alive sort of reading of what we're finding
and what's coming out and kind of keeping up to date with how
we're interpreting and understanding the site as well when you're

(49:52):
not actually here which is fantastic so when
does the saviour to the on the 10th of february visitors
can come to the roman army museum and see our brand
new shop cafe and septimus severus exhibition
in in the gallery and as well as the
rest of our fantastic collection and then come the 1st of april april we'll

(50:12):
be starting excavations and during april and may our activity center will be
open and all of our events are up on the website so people can come and hear
those accessible trench talks
take a walk up on site or come and join in at any of the events as well.
Season oh yeah never stops,

(50:34):
also you mentioned that there was national lottery heritage
so abundant and just being
made aware at the day that there was a little sometimes you can if you're
a lot absolutely yeah yeah
so all of the national lottery players are contributing to us to be able to
do this project do this research engage with current and new audiences so if

(50:58):
you purchase purchase a National Lottery ticket on a specified date,
which will be made available through our website.
You get free entry to both the Roman Army Museum and Magnafort and Vindolanda Fort Museum.
So you can come and see with your own eyes what we've been up to.
And that is completely for free with the ticket as well.
Fantastic. Thank you, Rachel, Anasol, Realtime. Thank you for coming to see us.

(51:23):
Yeah, come back soon. Once the air is diluted. Maybe with some sunshine We're coming for biscuits,
Thank you very much Thank you,
We'll be back next time With more Tales from the Trowel Make sure you like,

(51:43):
follow and subscribe From wherever you get your podcasts So you never miss an
episode Tales from the Trowel An Archaeology News North East production In association
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