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From Alan Bowman and David Thomas, Vindolanda: the Latin writing
tablets London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies,
1983, pp. 24-26
The great depth at which the tablets lay and
the extremely waterlogged conditions which obtained in the deep
sections were not the only difficulties encountered in excavating
the writing-tablets. The bracken flooring was heavily compacted,
matted and tangled and could not easily be dissected in situ. Trowelling
was not a suitable technique for such delicate objects and it was
therefore found more convenient to cut the flooring in sections,
like peat, and then to dissect each section individually, carefully
extracting the tablets from the organic matter which clung to them
21.
The compaction of the flooring in antiquity probably caused some
fractures in the tablets. The process of extraction will have increased
the amount of fragmentation, but there is no reason to believe that
any material has been lost. We should not necessarily assume that
every piece was complete when it was thrown on to the dump. Excavation-techniques
did improve during the course of the 1973-5 seasons, to the extent
that it later proved possible to attempt recovery of the tablets
in situ. If there are yet more tablets in the ground, the methods
so far used should prove equally effective in recovering them.
The conservation process which has been developed
to deal with the tablets is also a considerable achievement. In
the case of papyri, which are preserved in dry conditions, deterioration
of the fibre and fading of the writing occurs, if at all, only over
a very considerable period of time. This is not true of the writing-tablets
which have survived in damp, anaerobic conditions. There is a marked
tendency for the writing to fade on exposure to the air and for
the wood to disintegrate, though this is not uniform (we do not
know why). Although stylus tablets have been successfully conserved22,
we do not know of any successful attempt with objects as thin and
as fragile as the Vindolanda tablets. There are, of course, very
few similar tablets (cross -reference, Vol.
I, Ch. 2 but the writing on the comparable example found in
the City of London did not survive the attempts to preserve it23.
It is therefore a notable achievement on the part of the staff of
the British Museums Research Laboratory that a process was developed
to conserve the tablets which involved very little or no shrinkage
(a maximum of about 5 per cent) and no loss of visible writing on
those fragments where it survived24.
The process is a simple one which involves prolonged soaking of
the tablets alternately in baths of ether and methyl alcohol. It
may now be regarded as a standard procedure for such objects. All
of the finds from the seasons 1973-5 have now been processed in
this manner with no observable deterioration, although when the
tablets are dry they become quite brittle and lighter in weight.
In most cases the cleaning process which had taken place prior to
conservation had removed the adhering dirt, but even after conservation
it was possible to remove any remaining debris, if necessary, by
careful use of a fine point (e.g. a needle) and a soft brush. Any
danger of scraping away the surface could be lessened by using a
microscope (10x magnification was normally sufficient).
The visibility of ink writing on some of the tablets suggested,
by analogy with papyri, that (even in those cases where the ink
had subsequently faded) infra-red photography might succeed in rendering
it visible again. This technique did prove successful in many cases
and the photographs were generally sufficiently good for transcriptions
to be made without recourse to the original tablets except for the
purposes of checking for odd bits of dirt, or pitting, which could
look like ink on the photographs25.
Even so, some problems still remain unsolved. (1) Those cases in
which the ink has faded so badly that even the infra-red film could
recapture only faint traces; there seems to be nothing we can do
about these. (2) The scratches on the stylus tablets are, of course,
not susceptible to infra-red; with these it is merely a case of
adjusting the lighting to achieve the best possible relief. (3)
There were several pieces of which the photographs did not show
a clear differentiation between the writing and the background;
the writing appeared fuzzy and it was suspected that the infra-red
radiation was not being adequately reflected by the wood (in contrast
to the absorptive qualities of the ink)26;
in some of these cases further significant progress was made by
using ultra-violet light with the infra-red film and a Kodak Wratten
87 filter27.
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