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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > January/February 2004

Letters from the Frontier

Tablets Unearthed at a Roman Fort in Northern England

By David Frye

In March 1973 the British archaeologist Robin Birley made a puzzling discovery. He had spent years in the thick, gray clay of northern England, excavating a first-century A.D. Roman fort called Vindolanda, but he had never before encountered so many small slivers of wood. Inwardly, he even began to wonder about the possibility of an ancient woodworking shop. But when he and his assistants examined the wood more closely, they spotted tiny black marks, possibly man-made. His curiosity piqued, Birley peeled apart two thin slivers of wood that were stuck together and made the discovery of a lifetime. For […]

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Footnotes

1.

R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright, The Roman Inscriptions of Britain (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1965).

2.

For information on wax tablets a thousand years older than the Vindolanda tablets, see Dorit Symington, “Recovered! The World’s Oldest Book,” Archaeology Odyssey, September/October 1999.