Week 3 Round-up (finally)

The last week of the season was a whirlwind! We had multiple specialists on site as well as representatives from various heritage and environmental institutional bodies, and we had to make sure everything was recorded and packed away for the off-season.

In finds, Margot’s team repacked artefacts taken out for student and visiting scholar research, ensuring they were still in superb condition (monitoring humidity strips and changing silica gel specifically) and not showing any signs of degradation. The probable gaming piece below left was used as an example for pitching a new exhibit of currently-off-display finds to the castle team. The finds bags in the middle were a few examples of melon beads selected from a large quantity we pulled for our student Helena to examine for her independent glass bead research. On the right, you can see our massive collection of single stycas…this doesn’t even include the hoard! A coin expert joined us one afternoon, so we moved the solo stycas temporarily into a context tray so they could flip through them easily in context order.

The students working with environmental sorted through a number of backlogged samples that had been floated, inventoried the storage areas, and moved all recent sorted samples into new boxes. We’ve created a new box system for environmental material, as it is usually one of the first categories of materials to get moved around by castle staff in their regular custodial and care-taking duties. New filing systems don’t sound super interesting when we put it like that, but it’s vital to meticulously manage and track our environmental archive. It also means new spreadsheets are afoot! We pulled all the newly-dried flots that fit the parameters of Alice Wolff’s archaeobotanical PhD studies, which we discussed here and here. And lastly cleaned the flot tank out one final time!

Sorting a floated sample in the 4mm sieve.

Lorna poses with her buckets of sediment while cleaning the flot tank. As you can imagine, not a lot of photos of this perennial favourite activity exist because we are elbow-deep in mud.

Out on the green at the base of the castle, our colleagues Kris Strutt and Dom Barker from Southampton continued to teach our students to gather data via resistivity, magnetometry, and GPR. Kris also popped into the Inner Ward to see if he could record any usable data in the highly-disturbed area at the top of the mount, while Dom explored one of the fields adjacent to our medieval harbour. We have preliminary readouts of the surveys, but our analysis is not quite complete. When Kris and Dom finish their current assignment (and have a few days to rest from all that walking), we will reconnect with them, better articulate what we were seeing, and ideally identify the various anomalies.

Dom demonstrates how to use the magnetometer.

Dawn and Saffron finish up the resistivity survey of the green.

Ryan and Bradley push the GPR cart past one of the large spotlights pointed at the castle from the green.

Kris traverses the bailey of the Inner Ward.

We also welcomed two guest specialists to our open trenches! Peter Ryder, a medieval buildings expert, spent the day poking and pondering about the multiple phases of masonry we have in the outworks. We hope to have an update on his findings in the near future. Tony Liddell, a photogrammetry expert, joined us to take high-resolution, overlapping photos of our trenches to create 3D models. Both of these consultations were made possible due to our funding support from Castle Studies Trust.

Peter Ryder (L) and Tony Liddell (R) talking over what they see in the tower masonry.

Tony Liddell stands in Trench 5D to take photos and will produce a 3D photogrammetric model.

Finally in the trenches, we extended 5D, 5E, and 5F before recording them and closing them. Our blocked entranceway (5D) was extended towards the Victorian stairs to what we had been calling the postern gate. We uncovered rubble under the foliage and then a gentle slope of earth. 5E, between the two medieval walls, revealed more pavement of flagstones and cobbles. Trench 5F, for some reason referred to as “Betty” by the students, gave us access to more of the façade of the tower but we only brought it down to the top of the windblown sand layer first seen in last week’s round-up.

Elizabeth extends the trench near the blocked entranceway, with the Victorian postern in the background.

Looking towards the dolerite, an earthen slope that meets stone rubble crossing it, and, further away, the castleward “doorjamb” of the blocked entranceway.

A final look at 5D.

5D during the last week of digging.

Ryan planning our pavement in 5E.

The pavement in the sunshine as we left for the season.

5E planned and then closed for the season.

The tower and the removed fence to allow our extension (Thanks, Stu!)

Elise begins the extension early in the week.

Elise revels in her favourite spot on site, 5F, at the end of the week.

View of the tower (5B), and then the extension of 5F.

We also removed some more rubble from the well room, which has still not been bottomed-out. The paparazzi did catch this rare photo of Claire Watson-Armstrong, and we were so excited to have her on site! She has been a vocal supporter of our work, and it meant a lot for us all to see her having a blast on the hunt for the medieval well.

Claire Watson-Armstrong down in the well room!

Thank you so much for following along this season! We appreciate your patience getting this final update posted, as we all went our separate ways Saturday morning and immediately back to our day jobs on Monday. We’ve gotten a chance to breathe and organise our thoughts, so expect more content over the next few weeks: Graeme’s season round-up, our masonry theories, 3D models, and our geophys interpretation. Finally, thanks again to Castle Studies Trust who supported us in our endeavours this season. You can read all about the work we were able to undertake so far from their generous grant at this link, and updates on on our results will also be accessible from there in addition to the main blog page.

And don’t forget about our post-ex week the 10th through 14th of September! We would love to see new and old faces there as we focus on finds processing, identification, and analysis!

Week 2 Round-Up and Return of the YACs

Week 2 was exceptionally busy! We made progress in some new areas, as well as getting an unexpected revelation about our well room. Finds and environmental processing continued, and we welcomed our geophys specialists to begin surveying the cricket pitch at the base of the castle. Finally, we also hosted the winners of the YAC Dig It! competition to spend a day at Bamburgh excavating and learning about the different jobs archaeologists do on site.

We opened a trench (5F) on the seaward side of the tower structure (just on the other side of the well room). So far, we have exposed a bit of what might be the outer face of the wall (those blocks sticking further out into the trench).

In addition, we realized that the well room goes down at least another metre using the exceptionally scientific process of probing some of the spaces in the new rubble layer we reached. When we say probing, we really mean just using a long stick to poke down to get an idea of any cavities or areas of particular soil compaction.

We began dismantling the fill of the blocked entranceway by Saint Oswald’s Gate in Trench 5D. You can see the abrupt, but even, face of worked stone that would have been the door jambs. There is also a large stone that is cut and worn as if it held a large hinge of a gate or door.

Finally, on Friday, we revealed a cobbled or flagstone surface in Trench 5E. It sits lower than the top course of foundation stones we revealed at the base of the higher extant wall (below right). Could this have been a pavement from before that phase of masonry?

This week multiple objects came out of environmental processing, including this copper alloy fitting and a bit of iron nail both from soil samples near the metalworking building in old Trench 3. The nail was particularly interesting as the corrosion seems to have preserved wood grain in the rust; this happens especially with iron because the corrosion product absorbs nearby materials into the rust, and archaeologists sometimes find iron with bits of bone, pottery, and glass protruding from the corrosion. This nail was from a posthole, so it may have been used to secure parts of the metalworking building’s timber structure.

In finds, we’ve been washing and sorting material from the well room, including parts of a hand-cranked automobile, which is a bit hard to date because they were being produced up until the 1960s, but the tyre seems WWI-era! What’s going on here? See below left for the tyre, petrol tank, and crank. Below right is what looks like the pieces of a sink. Many broken bits of bottles and pottery have been brought up for processing, and some of it is identifiable to a specific company by maker’s marks and glazed patterns respectively. Since these bits are coming from the same context, we can pull all the ceramics and practice pot-mending with them.

Our friends from the University of Southampton arrived at the end of the week to help us survey the cricket pitch for associated defensive structures like ditches or moats from the medieval period. You can read more about our first day surveying here.

Finally, we welcomed Abbie, Myles, and Willow from the Young Archaeologist’s Club. They won a day on site with us, so we took them around the new trenches and the West Ward, showed them some of the finds from our teaching collection as well as the stuff coming out now, and then let them try a hand at flotation!

Way Back Wednesday: Weaving Combs

In Paula Constantine’s talk yesterday, we spent some time learning about multiple types of looms and how the evidence of them archaeology is usually limited to the associated tools. There is also evidence in the Old English literature corpus, sometimes where you might not expect.

When you are weaving, regardless of the different types of loom available during the medieval period, you have a vertical threads called “warp” that are tensioned equally (often using loom weights). The threads you are pulling through horizontally are called the “weft.”  The tension keeps the warp taut, but the weft doesn’t have the aid of gravity to keep everything even. Weavers have developed different types of tools to push down the weft. There are beaters that look like blunt swords and bone or antler combs that look like hair combs with longer handles or bulky forks. We’ve got several of these weaving combs in our archive. The earliest one we have in our care wasn’t excavated by our team, or even Brian Hope-Taylor, but rather the locals nosing around the site in 1896. Notice the ring-dot motif we find on all sorts of material from the Roman period through the medieval. Remember our dice? BHT helpfully (sarcasm) glued it to some cardstock, and it eventually joined our archive when our team collected his materials from RCAHMS.

Other weaving combs have been dated to as early as the Bronze Age, but the online digitised examples at the British Museum date from the Iron Age. Here are two lovely examples. They are most often categorised as “comb beaters” if you’d like to search for others. Whalebone weaving combs have been found in Orkney from this time period as well. Here is an interesting paper on Iron Age weaving combs in particular. They are used throughout the medieval period as well, and even today you can purchase fancy handmade versions for your own weaving work.

Fresh from the Wash: Clay Pipe Bowl

Clay tobacco pipes are found all over British sites during the colonial period, from here to North America and Australia. We talked extensively about this artefact type in a previous post here, and, for some of us, this extremely common find never gets old! Several fragments came out of the wash of material from a triangular trench between the Victorian stairs to the postern and the masonry with the arch (Trench 5C), but none had any marks to give us a clue of where they were produced. We can identify clay pipes by stamped marks along the stem (usually a name or location) or stamped and/or moulded marks on the bowl (shapes, initials, decorative imagery). Around here, we most often find pipes marked along the stem as Tennant’s from Berwick, but once in a while we find some from Edinburgh-based makers as well. There was one bowl among the fragments with a sliver of decoration still visible.

Pipe bowl from Trench 5C.

A quick message of the picture to former assistant supervisor Daniel Bateman, a specialist in clay tobacco pipes, was immediately fruitful. He was able to tell us immediately that it was once a heart with hachures like a lattice or fishnet. He pointed us right to the Society of Clay Pipe Research Newsletter, where this illustration from Peter Hammond’s “Tennant & Son” essay shows us what the pipe probably looked like when whole:

Figure from page 50 of Hammond’s Society of Clay Pipe Research essay in issue 75 of the newsletter.

These pipes were being manufactured in Berwick by Charles Tennant, and then later his heirs, starting at the earliest in the 1840s. Their business expanded over the years until clay tobacco pipes were fading out of fashion (around WWI), and the eldest Tennant son broke off to become the pipe-making Tennant of Newcastle. This particular short style was called a “cutty,” and the opposite side of the bowl would have probably had “TW” stamped on it. In the Society’s newsletter is an exploration of the possible origins of the TW stamp that became used more widely by Dennis Gallagher, with a replying comment just after the essay from none other than Peter Hammond of the previous linked essay. Slightly earlier pipes can be found with those initials that matched an Edinburgh maker discussed by Gallagher, but Hammond’s reply says that in many cases it could be an abbreviation for “The Workman” which is how the now-anonymous artisans may have signed their work.

Fresh from the Wash: So Smooth

Washing some of our finds from last year’s digging down in the outworks, a curious smooth bone appeared. When we say smooth, we really mean S M O O T H.

At first, we thought it might be natural weathering, as if the bone had been transported by water perhaps. But the edges are so even, the shape of the end seems so deliberate. When you hold it in your hand, it’s the perfect size and shape for a tool! Bone tools are not uncommon throughout prehistory and the medieval period, but blunt tools like this today might be made of plastic, carved wood, or even moulded rubber.

Our first possible identification was that it could be a pottery tool! When you coil-build pots, you snake little rolled strands of clay around the edge of a hand-formed base, making it taller and taller. Hand-building pottery also requires quite a bit of smoothing to remove every trace of the coils and where they connect to each other. While our team was musing about this aloud, we asked the students finds-washing what they thought. One of our brilliant students said that she makes ceramics as a hobby, and they still use tools like this even on potter’s wheels to smooth and shape profiles of vessels. And they are still called “ribs” today, even though they are rarely made of animal bone.

The more we thought about it, a new possible function for this tool hit us like a ton of bricks: leatherworking. Even in modern leatherworking, craftspeople use smooth bits of rib or long bone to burnish the hides. Burnishing is the process of smoothing and sealing leather, the former is aesthetically pleasing and the latter is functional, basically waterproofing. Today, these tools are commonly called “lissoirs” or “slickers.” Rib bones are flexible, and, when the tips are ground smooth, they won’t cut the animal skins.

Lissoir in use, from the press release of the Abri Peyrony and Pech-de-l’Azé I Projects.

In the last decade, Neanderthal sites in southwestern France have produced tools similar in form and texture to the bone we have. These examples from some species of deer dated to about 40,000 years ago and completely rewrote the history of Neanderthal technology as well as that of leatherworking! Many early bone tools were believed to be recreations of stone tools, but when it comes to lissoirs, bone seems to be its native medium because of its specific qualities mentioned above. Then, about two years ago, a site nearly TEN TIMES older (almost 400,000 years) also in use by Neanderthals (but this time outside of Rome in Italy) were found to have bone tools including likely lissoirs made from wild cattle bone. It is highly likely that this technology was invented by our Neanderthal “cousins,” according to a specialist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. Whether this tool type was invented independently by Homo sapiens (us) as well or we learned it from Neanderthals is still to be determined.

Because this tool type has been around nearly 400,000 years, it’s not immediately clear when our example dates from, as the context from which is surfaced is fairly mixed with medieval and post-medieval artefacts.

Week 4 Round-up

This week included a lot of recording and sorting, some massive earth-moving, and preparing to leave site!

Every stone drawn to scale.

We digitised a bunch of plans and context sheets, and we also continued monitoring the finds in the archive annex and updating the database with location information.

Top floor of the windmill was computer HQ.

We were so grateful to have friends of the project get those incredible drone photos for us on Tuesday. You can see some sneak peeks here.

A very excited trench team looking at the drone photographs.

Some interesting finds came out in all the processing, such as the yellow glass bead and bone pin below. The bead came from an environmental sample taken in 2013 of 9^th/10^th-century context; multiple 2013 samples run this season also produced several other beads, but all but one of those were ceramic (the other a crinoid fossil, “Saint Cuthbert’s bead”). The bone pin is from a context tray from Trench 5c that we looked at today before organising storage. It was from an area of the long stretch of medieval wall where we had previously only been finding modern material, until we extended the trench (see below).

Bead (left) and bone pin (right).

In the trenches, we moved so much earth!

First, we extended the old 2002 trench along the longest stretch of standing wall which we are calling Trench 5c. The extension was to learn more about the rubble that is scattered perpendicular to the face. Some of the stone positions suggest that another wall came out of the length we still have.

Trench 5c extended.

Then, we fully exposed a large stone surface abutting the dolerite up at the postern gate trench we called Trench 5d. It’s not clear exactly what was happening, and we thought bringing down the inner face would answer our questions. It only gave us more questions! Two large stones with tool marks appear to have fallen down into the northern end of the trench. On the southern side of the trench, a large spread of mortar appeared.

Trench 5d stone surface (left) and mortar spread (right).

Thursday was the big day of rubble-removal with the help of Stuart and Steve from the Castle team. We would bet at least a [literal] tonne of rock was removed. On Friday, the well-room was cleared of the big stones, so we mattocked and shoveled as much soil as we could. We also cleaned off the steps! Finally, we photographed the steps and well-room even though both are not yet completely excavated.

It’s our last day on-site this season, so we wanted to let you know about what to expect in the off-season:

At least two blog posts will be headed your way in the next few weeks. First, Alice will be providing an update on the environmental assemblage and what it tells us about cereals at Bamburgh during the early medieval period. Then Graeme will do his usual end-of-season post with a round-up and tentative interpretations, plus some thoughts on our next steps.

Please also keep an eye out for news regarding our publication of the Bowl Hole research!

As always, follow us on social media for the latest information on our research and upcoming field school opportunities. That’s all for now, but you will definitely see us next year, back in the outworks!

Way Back Wednesday: Marine Life

A few members of our team went into the archive annex this morning to do some housekeeping: checking on and changing silica gel packets in the boxes of small finds. We have indicator strips that show when a box is no longer dry due to ambient humidity. Lauren grabbed a random box of environmental archaeology small finds to have a nose around, and, much to her surprise, it was mostly material she herself had found and recorded while managing environmental processing in 2013: stycas, glass and ceramic beads, and some flint flakes. In an amongst those bits from nearly a decade ago, two examples of local marine life appeared.

First, another St. Cuthbert bead! This one was found in 2010 in a burnt context from Trench 3. It seems to be associated with the stables phase of the trench, around 10th century. We hope to do a deep-dive post (pun intended) on crinoids in the future, as they have been on our mind after the large one we found earlier this season.

The second was something that struck Lauren and the finds team as odd years ago: it looked like a tiny cowrie shell. True cowrie shells (family Cypraeidae) were often found historically in Indian Ocean trade networks, so this miniature version was separated out as a small find because it seemed non-native to the area. The sample was taken in Trench 1, associated with an early medieval linear feature. Further research shortly after the dig in 2013, however, revealed more information about this tiny mollusc.

This shell is from the family Triviidae which has a two species local to the North Atlantic and North Sea, but the species are often called the “European cowrie” and “northern cowrie.”

Trivia monacha; left, a specimen from France, image by Joop Trausel and Frans Slieker (Natural History Museum of Rotterdam); right, a specimen from Spain, image by Serge Gofas (World Register of Marine Species).

The European or spotted cowrie is used to refer to trivia monacha (da Costa 1778), a carnivorous snail that lives at the low tide of the shore. They usually have dark spots on the pinkish upper shell, which our specimen does not have.

Trivia arctica; left, specimen from France, image by Joop Trausel and Frans Slieker (NHMR); right, specimen from Spain, image by Serge Gofas (WoRMS).

The “northern cowrie” is trivia arctica (Pulteney, 1799) which has an unspotted shell. These species were actually thought to be one and the same until 1925. Both species prey on sea squirts, and they are in turn food for fish like Atlantic cod, who also occasionally turn up in our animal bone. Our shell is also a bit chalky to the touch, but it’s not immediately clear if ours is a proper fossil and thus old at the time it was deposited in the sample or if it was alive contemporary to the occupation of the context from which the sample came.

Living t. arctica specimen, image by Frans Slieker (NHMR).

Why do we care so much about tiny molluscs? Why does it matter that this was found here? Molluscs are extremely useful when studying the environment in the past. Some snails have very specific habitable ranges that can help us infer climate information, and today is especially valuable in understanding periods of climate stability and instability in the past. Others are fantastic to chemically profile to understand the water and plant life signatures for a particular region, which was a methodology we used in our interpretation of the Bowl Hole burial ground skeletal material.

This particular shell was saved because it looked different from the mollusc shells we had been finding previously. It turns out it was local, but it was probably not being collected for food unlike the winkles we find en masse, so we don’t have examples of it in the record.

For more information and more images:

Gallery of the Family Triviidae via National History Museum Rotterdam

Differentiating the species

T. monacha, European cowrie: entry for Encyclopedia of Life, entry in World Register of Marine Species

T. arctica, Northern cowrie: entry for Encyclopedia of Life, entry in World Register of Marine Species

Museum Monday

This Monday, we’d thought we take a bit to talk about the re-installation of some of our most interesting artefacts in the Castle’s state rooms. For years, many of the conserved finds from the BRP and Brian Hope-Taylor’s excavations were tucked away in a little room at the far end of the gift shop in their own little exhibit. The only problem was that folks would reach the gift shop and often go no further. We were stumped as to how to draw attention to the artefacts and information placards when there was delicious fudge and souvenirs in the previous room. A few years ago, some of the artefacts were integrated into the existing state rooms displays, Our one-of-a-kind (okay, one of, like, three in all of northwestern Europe) 6-billet pattern-welded sword was logically in the armoury on the first floor of the keep; it’s uniqueness was sometimes not recognised when displayed amongst the shiny and sharp medieval and post-medieval bladed weaponry. While this melding of artefacts into existing spaces increased the quantity of eyeballs on the artefacts, it still felt like something was missing. How could we best use these artefacts to tell the stories of Bamburgh Castle?

The past year has allowed the curators to combine cutting-edge technology and some tried-and-true, good old-fashioned museum display protocol to give us a more holistic glimpse into the three millennia of occupation of the site.

The first room, what was the medieval kitchen, has been streamlined to focus on five particular assemblages in detail. The large wooden model of the castle is still there, but it is now joined by video screens and a projected animation on the upper story wall. The video screens stand behind the glass display cases or freestanding artefacts. This room features the Bamburgh Beast and filigreed thumbnail (both of gold) each in a minimalist mount, while the carved-interlaced stone chair-arm is positioned as it would have been during its period of use to really help you understand the wear patterns on the leading edge where great kings would have rested their fingers. Each video panel shows magnified views of the objects as castle owner Frankie Armstrong pleasantly and engagingly shares further information about the objects in his family’s care. From these short videos, you really get a sense that a deep responsibility to the stewardship of this shared heritage is the underlying driver for this revamped exhibit.

As you wind your way through the adjacent rooms, you eventually reach the salon where the curators have taken great care to give voice back to half of the population that is often written out of history elsewhere: the women. Here at Bamburgh, however, formidable women stand out to us through the material culture individuals whose names are now lost to us and the documented works for the public good by named post-medieval owners. The salon, a heavily gendered space in the early modern period, is the perfect matrix for these snippets of women’s history through objects. We hope in the future to see this exhibit expand to include more historically gendered objects (such as latch-lifters and girdle tools) and really engage with this idea of performed gender and femininity. As the named women hold elite status as well, so we hope to be a part of developing the artefacts on display to include objects associated with lower status women in our long history here.

The ground floor of the keep is our next stop, where there is now an interactive dig touch-panel. It allows you to excavate computer-animated grid squares of our former Trench 1 and Trench 3 to find artefacts that our team discovered over the years.

The traditional museum display case are also used in the base of the keep, with cases full of interesting artefacts and small placards describing them. The cases are now mostly organised by theme, allowing you to see every-day items like stycas, knives, and dice, and the more high-status and ornate material grouped together as well. Also, the fantastic sword we discussed earlier has found a home in the lower level of the keep.

You can still come visit us to the end of this week to chat about the archaeology with our team up at the windmill in the West Ward, and then take a walk through the state rooms to see some of our best finds in their new displays!

Week 3: Round-up

This week was particularly full of environmental processing, finds sorting, and trench recording! Not as much rubble has been removed from the main trench as the blocks left are much too big to be moved by hand, but we will have an update on the steps below.

Describing the soil sample (left) and drying floated samples (right).

The flotation tank has been up and running almost non-stop to get through backlogged samples. Nat runs a tight ship, and that ship is the HMS Floaty McFloatface. Multiple crude ceramic beads have been found this week in sorting the floated material.

Ceramic bead.

In finds, we’ve spent a lot of time sorting the huge volume of washed material from last week. Among this, we found an unusual number of very large teeth from cattle and horse which we discussed further here. And we found a possible buzz-bone!

Worked bone that may have been a toy or musical instrument.

We also spent some time illustrating finds to scale under the guidance of Finds Supervisor Margot.

LJ drawing a small copper alloy buckle.

A “new” bit of wall that has peeked out where it is interrupted by the Victorian stairs that go down to our old Trench 5a. It has been de-greened and a small trench has been opened up between St. Oswald’s Gate and the arch that looks towards Lindisfarne. So far we’ve revealed a lovely spread of mortar on the medieval masonry and lots of modern rubbish at its base.

De-greening and excavation teams.

The main wall along which the 2002 trench used to run has been further revealed and photographed. Multiple teams have each taken a few metres of wall to draw. These are just like the section drawings we do of vertical stratigraphy (the layers of occupation, or lack thereof, we can see in the soil), but instead we’ve got the masonry blocks of a standing wall to draw to scale.

Drawing teams.

More steps in Trench 5b have been partially uncovered, but not fully excavated due to particularly stubborn (and massive) rubble. These give off medieval vibes akin to what was found elsewhere in the early survey of the outworks stairs undertaken by our director long before we opened these trenches.

Steps down toward the arch.

What more will we discover in our final week? Stay tuned!

Way-Back Wednesday: Things Get Dicey

Digging around the archives, we came across a number of lovely bone dice! Not enough for a game of Yahtzee, but we’ll take what we can get…

Our dice all are made of animal bone, polished smooth, with incised ring-dot or ring-ring-dot markings for each face. The incision is a common decorative technique using a hand drill and found on all sorts of objects across time and space, and, when they represent numbers on dice, they are called pips which seem to simplify over time to single dots. Dice games are known to have existed since the Neolithic in Scottish contexts, but actually started as other thrown objects probably associated with fortune-telling and, later, gaming using four sides of a sheep’s “knucklebone” (more of an ankle bone). The Romans loved dice and used large and small variations; the Egyptians are believed to have the first 20-sided die (for you DND fans) during the Ptolemaic Period. Dice would have been extremely popular ways to pass the time and hopefully win something valuable during the Roman and medieval periods.

Modern dice have opposite faces that add up to 7, so the faces would be paired 1-6, 2-5, 3-5. Early dice were not perfect cubes, and in the medieval period they may have had opposing faces that added up to prime numbers: 1-2, 3-4, 5-6. Some medieval dice had repeating numbers and were rolled in pairs: one die had 1, 2, 3 on two faces each, the other with 4, 5, 6. Dice are rare in the early medieval period but often in the 7 configuration we are familiar with. They usually reappear in the archaeological record in our area in the 12^th century in the primes system. Standardisation only becomes fashionable at the end of the medieval period around 1450 when they move back to the 7 configuration. Check out this open access article comparing late medieval dice in the Netherlands and UK.

Some of the dice we have on display in the castle may have been “loaded,” primed for cheating, one method of which involves weighing one face with a drop of mercury so that the opposing face turns up more often. For more on an assemblage of dice including several cheat dice, check out this brief piece from Fordham’s Medieval London project. We haven’t done a proper statistical analysis of the rolls of any dice from our archive yet, but we may have rolled a few for bragging rights in the windmill. There was no clear run of luck for any of us, which must be a good thing.

Let’s talk a little about the dice we pulled from the archive. Because the early records of the dig are not all digitised, we could only access summary spreadsheets from our office in the windmill, so we unfortunately don’t have as much information about the contexts as we would like. This is absolutely something we can revisit as we reconcile records in the archives! All but one of the dice are associated with a single context in the centre of Trench 3, and the outlier is actually from a context just below the one in question, both part of the medieval to late medieval midden.

Two pieces kept apart for hundreds of years…SF1549 and SF1556

The first die is actually in two pieces discovered on separate occasions in the same area in 2004. SF1549 (meaning “small find number 1549) is a broken quarter with the only complete face showing a 1. SF1556 is another rough quarter showing part of side 5 and part of side 6. When put together, side 5 is complete. The 1 side is opposite the partial side 6, which tells us this is a die in the 7s category. The pips are double-ringed dots. The hollowed inside of the die shows no sign of tampering.

They match!

SF1756 is much smaller, but also a 7s die. It too has a double-ringed dot motif for the pip, and there is no obvious cheating mechanism. This was found in 2004.

SF1756.

SF6394 was found in 2009, associated with the same context as the others. It also has opposing faces that equal 7 and a double-ringed dot motif. There is also no particular penchant for landing on a particular number when rolled.

SF6394.

The last die we pulled was SF1896. This one was found just under the context where all the previous ones were found. This die is not even close to a perfect cube, as it has only two square faces: sides 1 and 2. The shape may have been why side 1 and side 2 tended to face up more often than any of the narrow rectangular sides. The incised pips are a single ring and dot. York Archaeology (formerly York Archaeology Trust) has a wonderful gallery with a similar rectangular die that seems to also have the 1 side on the square face. Our die is the only one in the primes configuration we have found so far digging through the archives, so there’s a chance this is earlier than the 7 configuration dice, that otherwise are expected to be late medieval. This context was under the context of the other dice, which by the law of superposition suggests that what is deeper in the stratigraphy is earlier (few examples exist of this rule failing in archaeology).

SF18966.

Care to try your luck?