Flora of the Frontier

: Exploring archaeobotanical remains from a Period III barrack room at Vindolanda Roman Fort

Abstract

Archaeobotanical approaches enable identification of a range of resources both available and used in the past, as well as providing evidence of the wider landscape people were interacting with. Whilst previous studies at Vindolanda have applied this on a macro-spatial level, this research pilots the potential of conducting this at fine grained resolution, by comparing macrofossils from across a grid within a single barrack. This was in order to explore the potential for reconstructing activity spatially within one room as well as to obtain the wider-level evidence for plants that were accessed and interacted with, from the local landscape and beyond.

With this in mind, botanical remains were extracted from waterlogged soil samples from within a single barrack room at Vindolanda Roman auxiliary fort and settlement in Northumberland, England by employing wet sieving methods and were analysed using a stereoscopic microscope with up to 80x magnification. This study suggests that the barrack room may have been a storage room in part of the Period III fort (90-105 CE) which was occupied by the Ninth Cohort of Batavian soldiers, one of the principal units identified at Vindolanda. Until now, this area of the fort has been beneath the water table and this study
therefore provides new discourse relating to plant use by different contingents of the Roman army.

Key finds show that the Batavian soldiers were using a wide range of differing habitats from around the Fort including for the acquisition of raw materials for flooring, and likely as foodstuffs. Furthermore, the results suggest that fine-grained spatial analysis may be able to inform future sampling and conservation management on sites which are ‘at-risk’ due to climate change through the identification of areas within a room which will provide the most information for study.

Date of Award	20 Jan 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Lucy J E Cramp (Supervisor) & Stuart J Prior (Supervisor)