Question about how they date trash piles at old Roman forts

I was reading about that dig at Vindolanda last month where they found all those leather shoes in a dump layer. It got me thinking about how archaeologists figure out the timeline when stuff is just thrown in a pit over decades. Do they rely more on coins and pottery types or the actual dirt layers to sort out which trash is older?

3 comments

3 Comments

mark_thomas16d ago

Oh, that's a great question. I used to dig on a Roman site in the UK back in the 90s, a small fort near Hadrian's Wall. The way we sorted out the dump layers was pretty much a mix of everything you mentioned. We'd look at the dirt itself first, the color and texture, to see where one layer ended and another began. Then we'd pull out the coins and pottery sherds from each separate layer. The coins were the best for a solid date, but you'd only get a handful. The pottery was more common, and we had a reference collection of rim shapes and decorations that told us which era a piece came from. So it's not just one method, you kind of use all the clues together to build a timeline, like matching a puzzle.

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rileynelson16d ago

And that matching puzzle idea is spot on. The stratigraphy gives you the sequence, but the artifacts are what lock the dates in, especially when you get a coin that's only been in circulation for a decade or two. It's really just a matter of cross-referencing everything until the timeline makes sense, and even then you're sometimes left with a few ambiguous layers.

tyler_wilson15d ago

Totally agree with you on the coins being the gold standard for dating... we'd get so excited when one turned up. But @mark_thomas, you mentioned pottery sherds being more common, and that's really the unsung hero of the whole thing. People don't realize how much info is in a broken pot's rim. You can narrow it down to a fifty year window sometimes just from the style. It's like having a hundred tiny clues instead of one big one. And when the stratigraphy matches up with those tiny clues, you know you're on the right track.