(This is the report on our previously noted visit – [Link])

Bianca Carpeneti and Michael Shanks visiting Alan Campbell MP at the House of Commons

Our current work on the archaeological project at Binchester UK includes a major focus on cultural resource management (CRM), as it gets called in the US. We’ve spent a great deal of time visiting people and sites around the Northeast in an effort to get a sense of the region and how it handles a landscape that is so saturated with historical and cultural sites. We welcome local volunteers (our key partner, Durham County Council, receives a grant for this from English Heritage). Our project is also somewhat unusual in that it is a research excavation (rather than prompted by real estate development), and serves as a summer school, while also explicitly aiming to develop cultural facilities (visitor access to the Roman past) in an economically depressed region. We are particularly interested in how an area — be it town, county, or region — incorporates stakeholder communities into this management process. We’re very much aware of recent moves in the world of heritage management, such as the Faro Convention (Council of Europe 2005) (see the entries last year in this blog [Link] and [Link]), that are shifting attention to sharing and disseminating cultural assets, as much as protecting and preserving tangible and intangible heritage. We want to explore how these changing attitudes play out in practice.

In pursuit of that, we went to London to meet with Alan Campbell MP for lunch in the House of Commons. As a member of the last Labour UK Government, a leading political representative in the north east of England, and a historian, Alan offered a valuable perspective on our research. Our discussion focused on local and regional identity, culture and economic development in the region. In particular, we were concerned with how these topics inform our excavation at Binchester and our archaeological survey of the Roman borders.

As we see it, CRM is fundamentally about the relation of economic interest to personal experience – the shape of people’s experiences, stories of people’s lives, how and what sources and records are acquired, what is made of these records. We believe these things direct an individual’s cultural values. Ultimately, we must ask: where are these different cultural values taking us?

We took up the topic of cultural value and put it to Campbell – what role for history and archaeology in regional development, in a region like the north east of England? To frame our discussion, it is worth highlighting several of the notable movements in the world of CRM, especially in the Northeast.

The likes of John Schofield, our colleague at the University of York and latterly with English Heritage, the government agency responsible for archaeology in the UK, have stressed the connections between heritage and tourism. Tourism is a service sector that contributes about £7.5 billion to the UK’s GDP (contrast the motor industry – £5.5 billion). Heritage is here quite an asset. We might aim to make Binchester a tourist honey-pot, along the lines, perhaps, of Vindolanda to the north. John also points to a more dynamic notion of heritage that we very much support.

The Faro Convention places a premium on heritage as cultural action, that is, how heritage is best utilized in a variety of contexts, from vocational training to local planning and sustainable management of the environment. Moreover, cultural enrichment is proposed to go hand in hand with economic development. This notion and its implications should not be overlooked; cultural enrichment is not an incidental by-product but a catalyst for economic progress. That said, we must also be realistic about the challenges facing such proposals. Below, we outline some of the most pressing ones.

We discussed two major impediments to the UK even signing the convention, never mind implementing its recommendations. The first is the significant opposition, particularly on the political right, to seeing the UK as part of a European cultural landscape in the first place; and notions of UK national sovereignty and identity are invoked against policies coming from European agencies.

One of the most significant challenges to initiatives like Faro, though, is the current economic downturn that so many institutions (public and private) are struggling with. When push comes to shove, it is much easier to cut spending for a visitor center than a nursery school. As a result, regional development agencies are being abolished and instead regional development in the UK is now being focused on public-business partnerships. This throws into sharper focus the choice: just who is going to pay for a new story of the Roman north? Different values indeed.

Alan particularly raised the question of how regions are changing in the UK as well as in Europe (typically taken as a continent of regions that don’t neatly fit into nation states). The Northeast is one of the few distinctive regions left in the UK, given social mobility, a post-industrial economy centered on financial services in the south east of England, and globalization. But just what is an authentic north east regional identity? Is it knowing the song “The Blaydon Races”, or cherishing stories of Roman frontiers, border reivers, and latter-day north eastern industrialists like the Stevensons and Armstrong? Alan rightly, in our view, questions aspects of “Geordie” identity, many of which can be argued as being quite artificial eighteenth and nineteenth century inventions (Hobsbawn and Ranger’s classic work “The Invention of Tradition” is very pertinent here [Link]), or connected with broader global historical trends, particularly industrialization. He is much more concerned to look beyond regionality to more fluid articulations that lie at the heart of identity politics. We like this.

Alan pointed to the crucial changes in class culture over the last 40 years that informed, for example, the rise of New Labour in the 1990s. The occupational class communities that lay behind the political parties of most of the twentieth century have dissipated. New Labour shifted attention from old and static notions of identity (shipbuilding = industrial working class = Labour) to aspiration – you could still be Labour while aspiring to achieve what were traditionally seen as middle class and even conservative ambitions and values. The promise was to give people the space to shape their own identities, freeing values from inherited ideologies, looking forwards not backwards, harnessing identity (class membership, political affiliation) to hope and improvement.

Crucial changes might well be echoed in areas besides class culture. The old extractive and manufacturing industries of the north east, which gave the region so much of its character, have gone. Alan’s constituency is North Shields, home to some of the great shipyards of the River Tyne. Shouldn’t a government contract for a new Royal Navy carrier come to the Tyne? But we live in a post-industrial world of a knowledge and experience economy. Ships are not just welded steel and great engines. It would make more economic sense to build the actual hull somewhere cheaper and instead have the IT systems, that are now the core of the military, designed and built in the UK. This requires fostering links between knowledge institutions like universities with business corporations as well as government agencies. A knowledge economy begs the question of the role of knowledge/research institutions and suggests attention to the transfer of knowledge.

Is there any room in this scenario for archaeological and historical heritage? Not as long as we continue to design and think of cultural projects in subject specific terms. Instead, we need to re-think the way that CRM happens and design projects that are more intimately tied to such broader trends, as Faro actually suggests.

A successful knowledge economy is tied to innovation and creativity. The related shift to delivering not products but experiences, in what Joe Pine first called our experience economy [Link], throws emphasis upon how people desire rich cultural experiences and will choose one product over another on that basis. Innovation, creativity, rich human experiences are rooted in certain kinds of environments or, more accurately, cultural ecologies. Some cities, for example, have long offered such a cosmopolitan milieu that fosters innovation through vivid cultural experiences and opportunities.

Creating such rich environments is the work of the urban planner and designer (see the recent entry on the City and Port of Rotterdam – [Link]). History and heritage, as well as research and educational institutions, are crucial components, as is widely acknowledged. Introduce a dynamic notion of identity, such as we have sketched, and there emerge some fresh suggestions for archaeological projects such as ours.

Let’s work through an example.

We give support at Binchester to a very active reenactment community – enthusiasts who, on their weekends, dress and act like Romans. Most are very concerned about accuracy and authenticity: they have just the right gear. The narrative frame for their performance is typically the old one of empire and military occupation – Roman soldiers and attendant communities at the frontier. In spite of the authenticity of the reenactment (accurate details of dress and accoutrement), what we often witness is, arguably, a misinterpretation of life in the Roman north, a misunderstanding of the military in antiquity. Certainly the likes of Richard Hingley (one of our Principal Investigators at Binchester) and David Mattingley are questioning the nature of the Roman empire. Richard has headed a project, Tales of the Frontier [Link], that explicitly aimed to share this reevaluation. Michael is writing a text book with Gary (Devore, another Binchester PI), presenting a new model of the ancient political community. We see Binchester as part of such a reevaluation.

We really need to ask – What has any story of Roman times got to do with (regional) identity in the Northeast? This question opens up many possible avenues, given that people construct identity within such a wide and varied network of encounters: as they actually experience themselves, their memories and identities, their commitment to local life, their sense of prosperity, or not. How do such stories enrich the local cultural ecology, in the sense above?

Icons of identity? Romans in the north (?) and the Durham Miners’ Gala (2010) – [Link]

Bianca is suspicious of focusing our heritage work on the presentation of collections of artifacts, with attendant stock narratives, shoehorning people into stories of “the way things were”, as authorized by academic authorities. If we connect identity to aspiration, and not “the way things were”, we should establish what people’s aspirations are and offer history and archaeology that informs and enriches the future. Telling the story of Binchester begins and ends with contemporary people.

This is precisely a political process of representing a constituency. Listening – so that our academic expertise in working on the evidence of past lives speaks to people now. More than listening – we are putting the case for deep ethnography of an archaeological project, locating it within its contemporary cultural landscape. And acting – delivering cultural goods fitted to enrich people’s experiences.

This is just that kind of process of human-centered design promoted by this blog [Link - see the category design matters]. We suggest that seeing archaeological heritage management as a design process gives actionable form to the growing acknowledgement that community involvement and the consultation of stakeholder interests are central to heritage management.

The past is only vital when future oriented. And, symmetrically, the past is the basis of vital innovation, creativity and cultural prosperity. We should see archaeological sites and collections less as objects of stewardship, subject to protection and conservation, and more as cultural infrastructures – places, resources, facilities that foster creativity and innovation, because they help orient our aspirations and hopes for the future.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London was established to inspire industrial design. In our Revs Program at Stanford [Link] and [Link] we aim, within the context of our engineering and design schools, to create a car museum that is simultaneously a design studio. This is how disciplines like history and archaeology can connect with a knowledge and experience economy – the academy as a studio for human centered design, and where the human necessarily involves the academic Humanities and Arts.

Textures of everyday life? An interior at Beamish Museum of the Living North [Link] [Link]

Thus far, our exploration of the northeast continues to affirm the idea that it is the “human-centered”-ness, the humanity of the past that makes it resonate today. The reenacting Romans we met this year at Binchester were actually more interested in the textures of everyday life than in an historical narrative of conquest and occupation. They were humorous and very human, rather than historical, in their performances. At Beamish, the Living Museum of the North [Link], there is little reference to chronology or historical drama in a visit to its reconstructed farms and town from the last couple of centuries; instead there is a very poignant and human experience of lifeways and quotidian texture now lost and gone. Andrew Birley, heading the excavations at Vindolanda [Link], has focused the new site museum less on the history of the Romans in the north, and more on just these kinds of texture. Because this is the humanity of the past that connects and enriches our appreciation of what we have, what we have lost, and what we stand to gain.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer put it well in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1941), their diatribe against the rationalizations of modernity and the coming horrors of European world war:

What is needed is not the preservation of the past, but the redemption of past hopes.

Here is the team – click on the image for a bigger version.

Up from Peel Bothy, Hadrian’s Wall, central section.

These photogenic experiences are starting to bother me …

Field season 2011. Staying by Hadrian’s Wall – Peel Bothy, Once Brewed (built/restored by John Clayton in the nineteenth century as part of his reconstruction of the Wall). Two more early morning runs – refusing to succumb to jet lag.

(Use the controls to navigate through the panorama)

Peel Bothy is a renovated workers’ cottage right by one of the turrets in this infamous central section of Hadrian’s Wall. This week I have been staying there.

Another morning run.

Though overly restored in the nineteenth century, the church of St Cuthbert at Norham on the Tweed still has some of the sumptuousness that originates in its original foundation by the bishops of Durham (Durham Cathedral houses the bones and grave of Cuthbert, and Norhamshire was not part of the border county of Northumberland, but of the County Palatine of Durham). The south arcade and chancel of c1170 remain.

It was on this exact spot in May 1290 that Edward Longshanks, King of England, declared he was come in the character of supreme and direct lord (Arthur’s heir), to maintain the tranquility of Scotland in its disputes over the succession, and to mete impartial justice to the numerous claimants of its crown.

There followed three centuries of border conflict.

Gary Devore and Michael Shanks

Binchester Barrack block turned abattoir – the late cattle ranch in the corner of the fort. The town extended beyond over much of the terrace above the River Wear (courtesy Michael Shanks)

The new excavations of Binchester Roman town in the north of England, running since 2009, are seeking new answers to old questions about the Roman empire and its administration, about the character of military occupation, the life and experiences of locals and the soldiers drawn from the far reaches of the Roman world, about the towns and military outposts built into ancient rural landscapes.

The borders between England and Scotland, the “debatable lands”, were once the northern edge of the Roman Empire. In the second century CE the emperor Hadrian had the frontier marked with a wall some 70 miles long, and the garrisons, totaling up to 15,000 troops, controlled a broad military zone organized around forts and a system of roads. To the west of the Pennine Mountains, a road linked Carlisle (Luguvalium) with Manchester (Mamucium) to the south. Forts along its route were spaced about a day’s ride apart and funneled provisions and traffic to and from the frontier. On the eastern side of the Pennines was Dere Street, which began at the legionary headquarters of Eboracum (York) and ran north through the supply-depot town of Coria (Corbridge), at one time extending well into Scotland. The site of Vinovium or Vinovia lay on Dere Street, about 30 miles south of the Wall, guarding a crossing of the River Wear. Its name means “on the wine road” and suggests an important link with the sort of Roman imports valued along the frontier! Vinovium is now known as “Binchester”, “binns” – cattle mangers (Old English) in the ruined remains of the fort – “ceaster”.

Binchester has always been known as the site of a Roman fort; the remains of the distinctive fortifications are still visible in the fields of pasture, even when landscaped and incorporated into the grounds of the nearby 18th century manor house. Roman finds, including carved altars and especially coins (locals called them “Binchester pennies”), have frequently been found in the area from at least the 16th century.

Binchester 2010 season – a small bronze sculpted head (courtesy Michael Shanks)

In 1815, a horse drawn cart heading out of the manor’s Home Farm fell into a hole that had opened up by the track. The raised hypocaust floor of the fort’s buried bath suite had collapsed. Instead of filling in the void, the squire built a subterranean brick vault over the Roman remains. Visitors could descend some stairs and see the bath’s impressive heating system, crawling around the brick pillars of the hypocaust floor that had not yet collapsed. Soon afterward, the manor house changed hands and the new owner had little interest in antiquities. The stone altars that had been collected from the fields were repurposed as props to support shaft and tunnels in one of the many local coal mines. In 1836, the Church of England purchased the estate, halting further destruction to the ruins and artifacts. Forty years later, the first small-scale antiquarian excavations were started in order to trace the extent of the fort’s defenses and its adjacent civilian settlement (vicus).

Renewed interest in the 1960s and 1980s brought excavations that uncovered most of the bath suite, one of the most impressive remaining in the northern empire, as well as the adjacent commandant’s house (praetorium). Improved archaeological techniques were able to identify several phases of occupation, although still not much of anything that pre-dated the Romans’ arrival. Probably built originally as part of the famous general Agricola’s march north from York in 79 CE, Binchester seems to have been incorporated into the supply route for Hadrian’s re-worked frontier, then possibly briefly abandoned when Antonius Pius established his Antonine frontier by the 150s up in the land of the Picts. It was back in service by the campaigns of Marcus Aurelius, possibly to police the valuable mines in the area. After the unrest of the third century, Binchester and other forts in Britain underwent a major change in their command structure, visible in the architecture. A long-standing timber praetorium was demolished and replaced with a much grander stone building that resembled a Mediterranean courtyard house with smart opus signinum floors, bathing chambers, and rooms heated from below via a hypocaust. Perhaps Binchester was now the prevue of a regional commander, newly appointed to restore order to an area of Britain that had participated significantly in the chaos of the third century. Over the next fifty years, the elaborate private bath suite (the one found by the horse drawn cart) was also added onto the praetorium as a separate structure: a facility suitable for entertaining quite a house party!

Binchester – the hypocaust heating in one of the caldaria (hot rooms) of the Commanding Officer’s Bath House (courtesy Michael Shanks)

Eventually, as Roman influence in the area began to wane throughout the fourth century, another change in the command structure seems visible in the ruins. The praetorium was divided into smaller apartments, and the bath building was made more public, servicing more than just the commander, his family and guests. Maybe the regional commander, important at the end of the third century, was transferred to a central post elsewhere, and the garrisoned fort split up what had previously been the property of the elite. By the time Roman control of the province unraveled in the early fifth century, Binchester was in a sorry state. Soldiers, abandoned without pay, became local petty warlords or were absorbed into neighboring communities trying to resist attacks from Saxon pirates and other enemies. The once grand rooms of the praetorium were turned over to blacksmithing and the butchery of cattle. The bath building’s pipes and hypocaust system were hopelessly clogged with ash and garbage, and part of the walls had collapsed. By the sixth century, occupation of the central portions of the military site had all but come to an end, evidenced by the burial of a young Saxon woman inside the rubble of the collapsed furnace room of the baths.

Binchester in the online world Second Life, the plan of the current excavation trench bottom right (courtesy Gary Devore))

Although this rough sequence of events is informed by the excavation of the praetorium and baths building, details are in short supply at Binchester. The site, a prominent hill and terrace controlling an important crossing the River Wear, suggests there should be some Iron Age or earlier occupation, but excavations have been too small in scope or have not been able to go deep enough to discover any trace of pre-Roman activity. The late third and fourth century praetorium and bath building are well studied, but they represent only two of the many buildings that would have serviced a substantial garrison for over four centuries. Apart from some antiquarian trenching, the extensive vicus, the town outside the fort, has been ignored, although some finds show that it may have been occupied well past the fifth century. Televised excavations in 2007 by the Time Team (Channel 4 UK) even found tantalizing glimpses of a monumental cemetery at the edge of the vicus – a street of mausolea. In order to uncover more of the site, to seek answers about the entire area over a long duration, and to plug all findings into a larger regional survey, a team of archaeologists from Stanford University in the US and Durham University in the UK joined forces with the support of the local Durham County Council. The project is run from Stanford by Melissa Chatfield, Gary Devore, David Platt, and Michael Shanks, and in Durham by Peter Carne, Richard Hingley, David Mason, and David Petts.

Teddy Bowers (Stanford) cleans a cattle skull (courtesy of Michael Shanks)

July 2010 was the first full archaeological field season for this Binchester Project. Two main trenches were opened, one inside the fort and one outside, in order to coordinate findings and explore any distinctions between military and civilian on this northern frontier. In the fort, the trench occupies the north-eastern corner immediately inside the defenses where geophysical survey suggested at least one barracks building and various intramural defensive towers. Immediately under the topsoil, the team found great spreads of cobble stones, puzzling rubble-filled depressions, a substantial drain, areas where the defensive rampart of the fort had been remodeled, and spreads of cattle bones everywhere. Painstaking, detailed work on the remains has revealed that in the post Roman period this area of the fort was taken up by a busy abattoir. The workers, be they native Britons, disenfranchised former soldiers, or a mix of the two, had taken over the crumbling remains of a stone barracks block. The building was subdivided and Roman building stone was used to construct a smaller utilitarian building set into the ramparts. (Reused stone was also taken across the river in the 630s to build the still-standing Saxon church at Escomb.) A few wooden pens held cattle until they were led into the former barracks to be slaughtered. This was the source of the plentiful cattle bone uncovered by our excavators. Its discovery has given us the opportunity to pay careful attention to a phase that often gets disregarded on Roman fort sites: the transitional early Medieval period. Life in Britain after the Romans left was substantially different to what had come before. The loss of Roman goods means that today there is much less to find archaeologically from that period. Most buildings would have been of timber, which is harder to identify and understand than stone. Dating is also difficult because Roman coins, a chief tool of dating, stopped being imported. The story now emerging is not a simple one of abandonment brought on by the collapse of imperial authority and the apparatus of the state. In fact, it seems that there was a deliberate attempt to try and keep Binchester going as a settlement after it stopped being garrisoned, perhaps even by former soldiers that had once been employed by Rome.

For most of its history, Binchester seems to have been as much a town as a military outpost. Geophysical survey, using ground penetrating radar and other techniques to see beneath the surface, has already revealed the extent and density of building far beyond the fort. To investigate this, the team opened a second trench this year in the vicus, the “civilian” settlement, just where the main road, Dere Street, left the fort and headed off south to Eboracum. In the latest, uppermost layers we have found substantial stone buildings fronting that road, as well as more cow bones. As we analyze the material, we will eventually be able to investigate the differences in the standard of living between the military and civilian sectors of Binchester.

This opens up a wide research agenda covering the character of urban and rural settlement in this imperial colony, the way administrative control manifested itself in daily life, trends and changes over several hundred years and more of pre-colonial settlement, invasion, occupation and aftermath.

There are some evocative hints of later phases of English history. The main road running through the vicus was resurfaced perhaps after the end of Roman rule. It would certainly have still been a main thoroughfare in the sixth century and later. This was the route taken in about 600 by the army of the Gododdin, a British people of the Hen Ogledd or “Old North”, on their way to face the army of the invader Angles from northern Germany. The two forces met at the stronghold of Catraeth, modern day Catterick in North Yorkshire, just to the south of Binchester. According to the ancient Welsh poet Aneirin, the British Gododdin were massacred to a man.

Debatable Lands – Hadrian’s Wall at Walltown Crags, looking east (courtesy Michel Shanks)

Archaeological sites such as Binchester fascinate with the intellectual puzzles they pose, and this attracts a large and diverse community of students, scholars, specialists, and enthusiasts. This past summer, nearly 400 people were involved in different ways with the project. As well as students, most of whom spent four weeks on site, there were shorter term visits from neighboring communities, including elementary school parties and local history society members. A class run by Stanford Continuing Studies, 28 strong, came over for a week of touring the region and working on site. A group of students from a Palo Alto high school came over as well. In another kind of experiment we have even begun the digital rebuilding and reconstruction of Vinovium inside the online world Second Life (http://rebuiltromans.blogspot.com/).

Binchester is in the heart of a post-industrial landscape that has seen better days; this was once a heartland of the industrial revolution in England. The project is committed to the complete integration of its work within the local community, whether that be through sharing the labor, in the stories and accounts we fashion, or in the interpretation center we plan eventually to build.

The Binchester project will be excavating the site for at least another four seasons, continuing to unite international scholars and students, and to give them an opportunity to excavate in a rich historical landscape. Follow the story on our web site at http://vinovium.org; photo galleries can be found at http://archaeographer.com.

Here I am up the Tyne Valley – where the Roman bridge crossed the river, carrying Hadrian’s Wall.

We are starting to plan for our excavations next summer of Binchester Roman town in the north of England.

Here is a short news item about this last summer, released yesterday.

July 2010 was the second archaeological field season for the Binchester Project. We are exploring the borderlands between England and Scotland, once the northern edge of the Roman Empire, excavating a key fort and town in the frontier system that included Hadrian’s Wall. Our excavation team of 46, drawn from Stanford’s Department of Classics, Stanford Archaeology Center, and 27 other academic institutions around the world, joined colleagues and friends from Durham University, the local County Council, and over 150 community volunteers in our ongoing exploration of Vinovium (the name used by the ancient Roman geographer Ptolemy). The project is run from Stanford by Melissa Chatfield, Gary Devore, David Platt, and Michael Shanks, and from Durham by Peter Carne, Richard Hingley, David Mason, and David Petts.

Last year, 2009, the first season, was very much a trial and reconnaissance. We had opened up a trench in the corner of the military base, immediately coming down onto what was left of the late Roman barrack blocks (300s and 400s CE), and also onto tantalizing remains of some later rebuilding – after the links with Rome had been cut. One of our interests is in what happened at the end of the empire, so this year we continued to worry at the great spreads of cobble stones, the puzzling rubble-filled depressions, a substantial drain, the remodeled rampart, and cattle bones everywhere.

A Roman site like this always offers substantial remains. The house of the commanding officer has already been excavated; the suite of baths, getting on for 500 square meters and with two heating furnaces, is the best preserved in northern Europe. It is not difficult, troweling and shoveling in a trench, to see the remains of walls of buildings around you, and to appreciate that you really are in what is left of a bustling settlement. Bones and pottery are plentiful; there’s a sprinkling too of bronze and iron artifacts. This year, like last, lots of coins turned up: over three hundred in just one week. (The site has long been known as a place to find ancient coins: they are locally called “Binchester pennies”.) We had significant finds of jewelry made from jet, a mineral that polishes up to an attractive black luster; Whitby to the south was the source. And there are signs of industry and manufacture: some of the jet is unworked, and we are finding bits of melted glass.

It is much more difficult after the Romans. There’s just less to find. And timber building is harder to identify and understand. Dating is difficult. But we work closely with Durham University’s archaeology unit, a company of superb professionals. Without them we most likely would have missed much of the story now emerging of what happened when the supply of imperial gold ceased to arrive from Rome and Emperor Honorius sent his famous missive telling the people of Britannia to see to their own defense. Like other sites, Binchester is already showing that it was not a simple story of abandonment of the Roman facilities accompanying the collapse of imperial authority and the apparatus of the state. We seem to have something like a cattle ranch at Binchester – a new building and a remodeled barrack block fronting onto a cobbled yard sheltering behind the old rampart.

Vinovium was as much a town as a military outpost. Geophysical survey, using ground penetrating radar and the patterning in electrical resistance and magnetism to see beneath the surface, has already revealed the extent and density of building far beyond the fort. A second trench was opened this year in the vicus, the civilian settlement, just where the main road, Dere Street, leaves the fort and heads off south to Eboracum, York. Again there are substantial stone buildings fronting the road, and stacks of cow bone. We are investigating differences in ways of living through the town and across military and civilian sectors.

The road was resurfaced perhaps after the end of empire; it would certainly have been a main thoroughfare in the sixth century and later. This was the route taken in about 600 by the army of the Gododdin, a British people of the Hen Ogledd or “Old North”, on their way to face the army of the invader Angles from north Germany. They met at the stronghold of Catraeth, modern day Catterick in North Yorkshire, just to the south of Binchester. According to the ancient Welsh poet Aneirin, the Gododdin were massacred to a man.

An archaeological excavation always involves connections like this with the history and archaeology of the region surrounding the site. And this is one of the richest archaeological landscapes in the world. To the north is Hadrian’s Wall, the largest work of engineering and frontier defense in the empire; its design and functioning still puzzles. Roman remains continue into Scotland alongside many prehistoric sites that take us back before the earliest farming communities. The medieval archaeology is no less rich, with over 500 fortified sites in an area little bigger than Santa Clara County here in California. Our team is taking up with gusto the challenge of using the excavations of Binchester to help develop understanding of the region. We have groups, drawing on undergraduate talent, tackling questions about the relations between towns and the countryside, the workings of the Roman economy, the character and diversity of the population changing through time. One of our Stanford special projects is concerned with the traditional craft of potting. With support from the Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities and a private donor, we are actually building a replica Romano-British kiln on campus – experimental archaeology!

This fascination with the intellectual puzzles posed by an archaeological site like Binchester is the glue that holds together our community. This year nearly 400 were involved in different ways with the project. As well as students, most of whom spent four weeks on site, we had shorter term visits from the local community, elementary school parties to local history society members. A class run by Stanford Continuing Studies, 28 strong, came over for a week of touring the region and working on site. A group of students from a Palo Alto high school came over too. With Durham University Department of Archaeology we presented a seminar about Roman frontiers. In another kind of experiment we have begun the digital rebuilding and reconstruction of Vinovium inside the online world Second Life. Ancient remains revived by the latest of digital design. [Link]

site – VINOVIVM.org

blog – [Link]

Barrack blocks turned into cattle farm? The corner of Binchester Roman fort, view out over the vicus/town

(Use the controls to navigate through the panorama.)

In the North East of England for the Binchester excavations – Vinovium.org.

Just to the north of our site.

Looking southwest, the Stanegate (Roman, named “stone road” in early medieval times) runs from the left of the picture, through the fort of Vindolanda and then straight up the rising ground beyond; Hadrian’s Wall is on the skyline running in from the right.

One of the few remaining Roman milestones still sits where the Stanegate enters the fort.

Hadrian’s Wall, edge of the built environment

In the North East of England for the Binchester excavations – Vinovium.org.

Dere Street, the Roman road that passes through Binchester, here runs north across what is now the English-Scottish border.

There was a medieval village – Kemblepath – up here in the wilds of Upper Coquetdale. On the site of Chew Green, the Roman fort and earthworks.

Map – UK Government M(ulti) A(gency) G(eographic) I(nformation) for the C(ountryside)

(Aerial photo – Tim Gates)

Dere Street crosses the River Coquet.

Coquetdale – a remarkable valley to the north of Hadrian’s Wall. A fascinating archaeological landscape.

Lordenshaws – prehistoric rock carvings and hill fort.

Shillmoor – from when the borders settled down in the eighteenth century.

Harbottle – feudal border stronghold, motte and bailey; the Drake Stone, center skyline – a druidic “Draak” stone? [Link]

Woodhouses Bastle – fortified homestead from the days of the raiding Moss Troopers (Holystone Grange in the background)

Magical – Whitton Dean, in the middle ground, is noted for its fairy community, Simonside Hills, to the left, for its mischievous elves.

See also the entry on Chew Green.

And the romance of the railway.

Just found a wonderful site called “Forgotten relics” – it has a page on a favorite village of mine (the castle straight out of Scott’s “Marmion”) on a branch line in the Scottish borders – Norham Station.

See also on Thomas the Tank, Ealing comedies and technicolor – [Link]

Checking out Hadrian’s Wall for our summer tour.

Chorography – checking out the car parks!

The report took an appropriately student-centered focus. And we certainly had a wonderful team last year.

Project site – VINOVIVM.ORG

In the tracks of northern antiquaries, summer 2007

Part of the estate of the second Earl Grey (1832 Reform Bill) on the Northumberland coast, UK.

In the tracks of northern antiquaries, summer 2007

September 9 1513: in the low rolling hills of north Northumberland an invading Scottish army was defeated in the bloodiest ever encounter between England and Scotland. James IV, King of the Scots, nine of his Earls, fourteen Lords of Parliament, five Highland Chiefs and 10,000 men at arms fell between 4 and 6 o’clock that afternoon.

We’ll hae nae mair lilting, at the yowe-milking,
Women and bairns are dowie and wae.
Sighing and moaning, on ilka green loaning,
The flowers of the forest are all wede away.

Jean Elliot “Flowers of the Forest” 1755

In the tracks of northern antiquaries, summer 2007

Abbotsford, Scottish borders, home of Walter Scott: armor from the field of Waterloo (1815); the skull of Robert the Bruce (cast, 1734).