Garrison Life At Vindolanda
Entry posted by Pertinax
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The ongoing work at Vindolanda will probably take centuries to come to fruition, a sobering thought, our own words will be history by then. The blog title is the title of the book by Anthony Birley whose family have devoted themselves to the exploration of the site , he himself was born in the house adjacent to the fort and I was priveliged to meet him, very briefly, recently.
The book is an excellent commentary on the Tablets and the great difficulties in retrieval,restoration and interpretation of the evidence. Its very specialised though easy to read, because Birley is totally absorbed in the Roman world and its interpretation. The extreme ordinariness is the great endearing factor of the tablets, the daily grind of provisioning and patrolling ;the flashes of contact between long dead writer and modern reader due to total , banal dullness of normal but wholly undestanderbale events-far more than reading about some deadly siege or warfare, senatorial intrigue or imperial madness .
The Batavii are brought to life, Germanic people of fierce pride lead by their own aristocrats as crack Auxilliae, who need beer , bread , shoe repairs, new underwear, bacon, lard, and want loans repaying on time and no funny business from dimwit native trainees who'd better learn to use a pilum fast (or else).
The deciphering of the texts is a near miracle exceeded only by their survival.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0...1608667-1014833
and apologies: the msn blog although holding bulk uploads of site visits is still very crude after I demolished it wholesale last year, Pantagathus' excellent TNOG site has my beer blogs
http://www.thenectarofgods.com/index.asp read em and weep!
and should recieve my herbal beer updates if spring ever arrives here, but my old photography blogs have been consigned to history.If I am able to upload some of my enormous video archive to a server I will certainly link to the Hadrian's Wall footage here.
http://spaces.msn.com/Triclinium/PersonalSpace/
dont forget there are multiple romanophile galleries here-use the drop down menu!
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