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Published: July 13th 2012
Durham from the Train Station
The castle, the cathedral, the rain clouds. This picture sums Durham up rather well, actually.Here I am, almost a year after my last post, spending yet another summer palm-first in the dirt. I’m afraid I haven’t been the best blogger – I never reported again from Greece, never wrote during my four months in Rome, and now I’m two weeks into yet another trip, quite frankly only writing at all because the site needed a day to dry out and my labwork is done. I won’t attempt to summarize all of my earlier adventures – even an entire day of free time can’t fit five months of travelling into a blog post – but I will try to pick up with the start of my trip to Northern England, where I am somehow spending yet another summer at an archaeological field school.
My journey began on Friday afternoon, June 29
th, as I blearily pushed myself through customs and onto my trans-Atlantic flight clutching a book of Latin poetry and sloshing around with a little too much coffee in my veins to be entirely comfortable. I had convinced myself, with the help of two of my high school friends, that it would be a good idea to forego sleep on Thursday night, force myself to
View from the B&B
Rolling hills! Sheep! The relatively blue skies the first day were extremely deceptive. stay up through Friday, and therefore finally be able to fall asleep when I got to my hotel in Durham, England about 48 hours later. I never suffered from jet lag, so I suppose it wasn’t too bad of a plan after all, but I was not too happy with myself at hour 30 of wakefulness. Aside from my slightly lessened brain capacity, the flight went smoothly, and – unlike last year – my luggage appeared promptly in London without any problems. I somehow managed to navigate the London underground, made my way to King’s Cross, and realized that I had given myself a little too much buffer time as I settled down to wait 2.5 hours for my 3 hour train up to Durham. After more reading and quite a bit more coffee, I boarded my train and settled in for the beautiful ride to the Northeast next to a chatty older Englishwoman very concerned with the state of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ relationship. I arrived in Durham around 2:30 in the afternoon but couldn’t check into my hotel until 4:30, so I attempted to spend my time wandering around the extremely picturesque city with a 50-pound suitcase
Durham Cathedral
There will be quite a few of these... in tow. I was unfortunately soon stymied by the hills and returned to read even more Latin (my thesis advisor will be thrilled) at the station. To get more of the authentic English travelling experience, and to please my mother, I ended up staying at a beautiful B&B a little ways outside the city for my extra day before the dorms opened. The views were quite frankly like nothing I had seen before, complete with rolling hills and scattered sheep, and I managed to take in my surroundings for a little while, having caught a second (or probably 20
th) wind of wakefulness, before collapsing into bed.
The next day, July 1
st, I caught a local bus from the B&B outside the city (after a lovely breakfast) to Durham. From there I promptly took a taxi from the bus station to Durham University, my home for the next four weeks, still reeling from my last encounter with the city’s hills too much to relish venturing out on foot. I was greeted cheerfully at the door of our particular college, St. John’s, by a welcoming committee of professors and local students, and steered through a maze of hallways to my single
(!) room with a view of Durham Cathedral. I then had some time to go exploring around the city before catching dinner at the college.
It occurs to me that I should probably explain what exactly this program is before I go too much further. Like last year, I’m spending four weeks at an archaeological field school, but this time, it’s at a late Roman site in England rather than a Bronze Age site in Greece, and is run jointly by Durham and Stanford Universities. That means that we get to stay in the rather labyrinthine St. John’s College, one of the many colleges that make up Durham University, where we get all of our meals provided and our sheets changed daily, and have at our fingertips the picturesque small medieval city of Durham, which is dominated by the university, the cathedral (an incredible monument built in 1080 that was used as part of the set for the Harry Potter movies), and the castle, as well as the River Wear, which winds through the city. The site itself, where we work from 9:00-4:30, is about 30 minutes south of Durham in the small town of Bishop Auckland, and is
generally referred to by its medieval name, Binchester, though the Romans called it Vinovium. In essence, without delving into too much archaeological or historical jargon, Vinovium was founded as a Roman fort in the first century CE after Claudius’ successful invasion of Britain about 30 years earlier. It protected Dere Street, the main N-S Roman road in Britain, which ran from modern day York in the south up to Hadrian’s Wall, the northernmost border of the Roman world. As tends to happen, a large civilian settlement sprung up around Vinovium as soldiers formed unofficial families and natives realized they could make money off the very cold, very wet soldiers from the Mediterranean stationed there. The Romans pulled out of Britain in the fifth century, but both the fort and the adjacent civilian settlement continued to be occupied in some capacity through the medieval period, and the directors of the project are hoping that the excavation will help us understand not only the working of the Roman military but the transition out of the Roman period in the north of Britain – did the soldiers simply pack up and leave? What happened to their families? Anyway, the dig is in its
Durham Cathedral
Most of the pictures inside the cathedral didn't work out, but I did manage to capture this piece of stained glass. fourth season now, so we’re just now making our way through the medieval layers and starting to expose the late Roman phases, which is most exciting for me since I am, after all, a Romanist.
Back to my story: Monday, July 2 was our first day of excavation. We can get up stunningly late for this dig (in comparison to Greece, where we were up at 4:30-5:00 AM to escape the sun), grab a breakfast, and then walk a little ways to catch a bus to the site. There are two huge trenches open at the moment, one in the corner of the fort and one at the border of the civilian settlement, and though I had been advised by a friend of a friend who worked at the site last year to try for the civilian settlement – better finds, she suggested – I got placed in trench 1, the fort trench. Unlike last year, we’re allowed to talk as much about the dig and the finds as we want (in fact, there’s a blog that updates mostly daily on significant progress made on site, full of lots of technical archaeology speak but with some nice pictures of
Durham Cathedral
A little blurry, but you get the idea. Can you imagine, built almost 1000 years ago? what we’re dealing with:
http://binchester.blogspot.co.uk/), but I’ll try not to be too boring with two weeks’ worth of stories of how much dirt I moved and how many cow bones I catalogued. In short, I’m working within a barrack block of the fort, and finding all sorts of goodies – the usual pottery sherds and animal bone and ceramic building material, or CBM, but also nails, pieces of Roman glass, almost-complete pieces of mortaria (a Roman ceramic piece of cookware with a rough surface for grinding herbs), the remains of several Roman sandals, and some brass studs. Someone on site tends to pull up a coin, a brooch, and/or some other piece of jewelry each day, so there’s a whole lot more going on here than at my last dig, which was dealing with material almost 2,000 years older than the buildings here at Binchester. Another difference between Binchester and Greece: the sun, and, consequently, the mud. We may have had two days in the entirety of the past two weeks where we’ve had more than an hour of sunshine per day, and most days it sprinkles if not outright pours. Since it’s Northern England, and if we stopped for
Durham Cathedral
This chapel contains the remains of Bede, a monk from the 600s AD who wrote the first history of Britain in Old English. rain no ground would have ever gotten broken, we try to deal with the rain as best we can, wrapping ourselves in rain gear and occasionally using sponges and buckets to clean the pools of water out of the deeper parts of the trenches. Sometimes, if it is simply pouring too hard, we have to stop entirely. This is partially for humanitarian reasons, but mostly because if we expose fresh dirt to the heavy rain we could get mudslides that would mess with the stratigraphy and make it impossible to tell soil colors from one another. If the rain is torrential and seems unlikely to stop for an hour or more, we’ll retire to the sheds that are set up on the edge of the site and start washing CBM and pottery sherds to prepare them for lab work. Needless to say, I have probably been more muddy from the knees down in the last two weeks than I have ever been in my life.
During the week, our schedule is fairly rigorous – digging from 9:30 – 4:30, eating dinner at 6:00, then having an hour of lecture after dinner two days a week – and we have
all-day field trips on Sundays (more on that later), but we do get Saturdays off as our one day of reprieve. Most people seem to have used their Saturdays to catch up on sleep/sleep off all the ale they consumed the previous night, but a small group of my friends and I (friends I made on the trip, three other girls who are all the only ones from their school here like me) decided that we would take advantage of our surroundings and we took a trip up to Edinburgh last Saturday. The train ride is 2 hours each way, so we got up fairly early and got home fairly late, but I don’t think there is any doubt in any of our minds that it was worth it. We managed to squeeze in Edinburgh Castle, which contains the National War Museum, the Scottish crown jewels, and the apartments of Mary Queen of Scots, Edinburgh Cathedral, which is absolutely stunning (though I couldn’t get any pictures inside), the Scottish National Museum (only a small section of it; it’s comparable to if not larger than the MFA), the Holyrood Palace, which is the Queen’s residence when she comes up to Scotland,
Durham Cathedral
A view from inside the cloisters. some shopping, and a lot of strolling. The city is still mostly medieval in construction and very beautiful, and it was an incredible experience. Downside: it was pouring the whole time. We all had on rain jackets and umbrellas, and were still soaked and freezing (it was in the low 50s if not 40s, and we could see our breath), which necessitated more tea stops than we would have made otherwise, but I wrote off the small extra expense as part of the British/Scottish cultural experience. The day was tiring, but definitely spectacular. The only other downside was the train ride home; apparently, the Brits and Scots can drink as much as they like on trains, and we had a group of about 10 40-year-olds (yes, 40-year-olds) who boarded the 7:00 already drunk out of their minds, continued to drink on board, and sang a dazzling selection of Abba at the top of their lungs for the entire ride. My ipod was well-used by the end of the trip.
On Sunday, we took our first field trip up to Hadrian’s Wall and Vindolanda. The wall, built by (you guessed it) the Roman emperor Hadrian in the early second century
Durham Cathedral
The hallway where they filmed a few scenes of Harry Potter 1 & 2! CE, was the border between Roman-occupied Britain and the wilds of Scotland at the time—under Antoninus Pius, his successor, forays were made into Scotland, and the Antonine Wall was built to the north, but the territory wasn’t kept for very long and Hadrian’s Wall served as the northern border for the vast majority of the Roman occupation. The first few courses of the wall remain in most places, stretching from one coast of Britain to the other with outposts every mile, and the remains of several of the forts along the wall have been well excavated. We took a bus as a group up to the wall, which is in a breathtaking stretch of country, and most of us hiked 4.5 miles of the wall (see pictures!) from a national park station in Northumberland to Housesteads/Vervovicium, one of the better excavated forts. After the unforgettable trek we took a bus down to Vindolanda, a fort set slightly back from the wall that has essentially become an archaeologist’s theme park for a number of reasons. One, the land is privately owned and the million-if-not-billionaire family that owns it has run continuous excavations there for the past 40 years, meaning that an
incredible amount of the fort has been excavated and is open to the public, and that they can afford a very nice museum to house all their finds on-site. Two, Vindolanda happened to be built on a particularly soggy bit of land, even for Northern England, which means that an unbelievable amount of organic material has been waterlogged and preserved where it would have simply decomposed in less anaerobic conditions. This means that archaeologists can pull out things like the Vindolanda tablets, wooden tablets inscribed with carbon-based ink that document the more mundane dealings of Romano-British life too trivial to inscribe in stone or get copied by monks – really the only ways that other Classical writings survive. I’d studied the Vindolanda tablets a bit in high school, so going there and seeing them was quite honestly a dream come true.
This week, my friend Sarah and I were in the lab two out of the four field days, working with a Roman glass specialist to help identify some of the Binchester finds and learn about the different techniques and uses of glass for the Romans. In addition, we got to listen in to a bit of the pottery
and coin identification, which was incredibly cool (I can now identify some of the Roman emperors by their profiles alone, which could be a nice trick to pull out at those raging classics parties).The labwork was a relaxing break from all the fieldwork, and we couldn’t have picked two better days to be indoors; it poured both days, but not quite enough to usher everyone inside, resulting in some very muddy students. Because of all the rain this week, the directors decided to give the site an extra day to dry out today – if nothing else, the area around the trenches where we all walk is quite literally a field of mud and would be seriously harmed if we kept squelching across it – and declared it a lab day, but since Sarah and I had already done our two days of lab work and written up the presentation that goes along with it, we were given the day off. Tomorrow is the Durham Miner’s Gala, a huge celebration of Durham’s coal mining heritage with all sorts of pomp and circumstance, and then on Sunday our trip will be more museum-based, as we’ll go up to Newcastle and take
Durham Castle
Also, the beautiful brown River Wear. a look at some of the finds that were pulled out from the forts we visited along Hadrian’s Wall.
Phew! In short, or in not-so-short, that’s at least a brief summary of what I’ve been up to over the past two weeks. I hope I’ll do at least one more entry before I come home (this past year has taught me that expecting any more than that will be hope in vain), but if not, I just want to emphasize how lovely it’s been here. Dirty and muddy and soggy, and perhaps a culinary step down from Greece and Rome, but full of incredible people, incredible archaeology, and incredible surroundings. A budding classicist couldn’t ask for more.
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