Since the Hadrian’s Wall Pilgrimage last visited Vindolanda in 2009, three major and many minor research projects on the site (which lies just south of the Wall) have yielded an astonishing wealth of finds. Spanning the 1st century to the 9th century, these discoveries provide deeply personal (and sometimes startling) evidence about the daily lives of this frontier community. From writing tablets and gaming boards to shoes, boxing gloves, and swords, the deposition of these diverse objects helps us to build up a sophisticated image of daily life both inside and outside the walls of the forts that occupied our site. There have been so many exciting developments that it is difficult to summarise them all in a few pages, but what follows is a brief account of the major research campaigns and a sample of a few of the wonderful artefacts that came from those excavations.
At the time of the previous Pilgrimage, excavations at Vindolanda had just revealed the remains of a temple to the god Jupiter Dolichenus within the northern ramparts of the last stone fort (see CA 240). Three of its original altars remained in situ, though they were badly scarred by the zealous pickaxes of the then Christian garrison that occupied the site in the late 4th century – while the building had been stripped down and the ground burned before the ramparts were reinstated, two of the altars still stood defiantly upright in their original positions, resistant to the destruction that had raged around them.
Their unlikely survival, which provided so much joy to a modern audience and knowledge about a long-lost religious cult, is perhaps the perfect metaphor for Vindolanda. It is a site that wants to tell its tales and to enable the stories of the people of Vindolanda to be shared (thanks in no small part to the approximately 4,500 volunteers who have taken part in excavations and post-excavation work between 2009 and the present). Yet, in rediscovering the altars, we had also left them at the mercy of the Northumberland sun, wind, and rain. Leaving these structures exposed to the elements would have enabled the environment to finish the work of the original destroyers of the temple – clearly something had to be done, and in order to preserve the altars for the future they were removed from the site and rehoused in a purpose-built display in the newly renovated Vindolanda museum (see box below).
Church Communities and Heritage