A remarkable discovery was made 50 years ago at Vindolanda, the Roman fort below Hadrian’s Wall. Four metres down, the archaeologist Robin Birley and his team came upon a mass of black, damp and stinky organic material. Miraculously preserved in this anaerobic time capsule were pieces of leather, including Roman shoes, some fragments of textile and numerous pieces of wood. These included a couple of thin, postcard-like, wooden leaf-tablets, less than 2mm thick, with strange marks on the surface that turned out to be cursive Latin written in ink.
The very first tablet discovered was a fragment of a letter, telling an unnamed soldier that socks and underpants had been dispatched, presumably in response to a plea for additional protection against the very damp and cold that would later preserve the note deep below ground. Now, the climate crisis is irreversibly altering these conditions, destroying Vindolanda’s buried treasures faster than archaeologists can get to them.
