Binchester finds washing

I am setting up the finds washing/marking sessions for Binchester pot/bone again. They will be Tuesday's and Thursdays (2pm-4pm) in the Dept. of Archaeology at Durham beginning Tuesday February 1st and continuing until we've finished it all! Drop me a line if you are interested

New Year at Binchester

Happy New Year from all of us at the Binchester Research Project. We've had some great news to kick things off, as we look forward to Season Three of the excavation this summer. The nice folks at the Roman Research Trust have granted us £2000 to fund two small evaluation trenches intended to investigate some interesting anomalies on the geophysical survey that they funded last year. One area of interest is a possible inhumation cemetery situated within an enclosure to the north of the site towards the Bell Burn; the other is a zone of what may be industrial activity nearer the north entrance of the fort. These trenches are not intended to fully excavate the features, but to evaluate the nature, extent and condition of the potential archaeology. This information will feed into the long-term plans for the project and enhance our understanding of the areas around the fort and vicus.

New light on the end of Roman Binchester

We're working away on the post-excavation phase of this year's fieldwork, and some interesting fragments of metalwork are coming up which shed light on the important transition from late Roman into the early medieval. Dr Rob Collins (Portable Antiquity Scheme), our finds advisor writes

"Two objects found in the 2010 excavation at Binchester have been tentatively identified as belonging to occupation of the site in the 5th century. The ring-headed pin (top photo)was an object of the Scottish Iron Age that continued to develop and see use into the Early Medieval period. The example found at Binchester is of a simple form, cast integral, and does not display any of the more elaborate decoration of the handpins more commonly dated to the Early Medieval period. The form of the Binchester pin may date to the Roman period, but ring-headed pins are not commonly found at Roman fort sites.




The second object can be more confidently dated to the 5th century. This is the terminal fragment of a Fowler class E penannular brooch (Bottom photo). The terminal itself is a stylized zoomorphic head, and the hoop of the brooch is decorated with moulded rings. In the northern frontier, these appear in the last quarter of the 4th century at the earliest and found at a number of Roman fort sites, notably those with known stratigraphic sequences dating to the 5th century."

The ring-headed pin was found in Trench 2 in the vicus, frustratingly, however, it came from the post-medieval linear that cut across the site and is thus out of context. The brooch fragment was found in Trench 1 in a rubble spread that lay between the barrack structure and the rampart.

The Beautiful Rooms are Empty

We are pleased to report that the full excavation report from the important campaign of work carried out at Binchester in the late 1970s and 1980s by Iain Ferris and Rik Jones is now available. This splendid two-volume publication includes full analysis of these excavations as well as substantial wider contextual material about the fort and the history of research there. This is going to be essential reading for those interested in the fort (including ourselves) and will certainly help redefine our research priorities in future seasons. The report is available from Durham County Council for £35 + £8 p+p.

Aerial-cam shots of Binchester

I've not yet had a chance to post some of the fantastic vertical and oblique shots taken of the site in September by Adam from Aerial-Cam. Using a digital camera on an extendable low mast attached to a Land Rover, he is able to take what are essentially low-level aerial photos. This has given us some excellent shots of Trench 1 (the fort) and Trench 2 (the vicus).

Binchester on Radio 3

Apologies for the short notice, but I've just found out that you'll get a chance to hear about Binchester on Radio 3 this Sunday evening (9.30pm-10.15pm). During the summer, Bettany Hughes and her radio producer came to Binchester to talk to us about the site for part of a larger programme about Roman Britain. The blurb from the BBC website describes the programme "Historian Bettany Hughes looks at our first contacts with the Romans and how people loved or resented their new overlords. Our relationship with the Romans used to be a cosy one - once we saw them as our fellow imperialists who civilised 'us natives', and a jolly good thing too. Even now that some of that 'special relationship' has persisted. We love discoveries of forts and towns and baths, and we're lot less impressed by a nice British round house. Yet perhaps 97% of our ancestors would have been living in those roundhouses, many of them turning up their noses at Roman culture beyond the odd bit of bracelet or pottery.

Where we do pay attention to the native British, it's to the freedom fighters like Boudicca and Caractacus, but we rarely think about ordinary life under occupation or the culture shock of suddenly finding yourself living in a Roman town. Roman towns would have looked as alien to our ancestors as the dizzying streetscapes of Bladerunner with their tall rectangular stone buildings, cacophony of languages and intimidatingly foreign way of life.

Nor do we think about the most important woman in early Roman Britain, the dazzling ruler of most of Yorkshire - the pro-Roman Cartimandua, queen of the Brigantes who built one of our largest iron age settlements at Stanwick and who caused an international incident when she ditched her husband for his armour bearer. Her canny but failed experiment in client state-building would set the future for the whole of the North of England. She was a much bigger player than Boudicca. It's up in the North that we see occupation in shockingly modern terms, as those enormous Roman armies set up permanent home, sucking the local areas almost dry and becoming the law of the land. Up here, occupation bites."

Next week at the same time, you'll get a chance to hear myself, Alex Woolf and others talking about the end of Roman Britain. Enjoy!

New images of artefacts

Just a quick note to say that I've uploaded some new images of some of this year's finds to the Binchester Picasa web album - scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the pics. I hope to shortly upload some of the fabulous aerial shots taken for us by Aerial-Cam, and hopefully some of the early versions of the site plans from this year's excavations.