ARCHAEOLOGISTS have gained a rare glimpse into life on the British frontier
of the Roman Empire by deciphering a 1900-year-old text that was unreadable to
the naked eye.
One section appears to document a transaction involving a slave who was sent
on a mission or possibly sold, says Alan Bowman of Oxford University. 鈥淚t鈥檚
interesting that they were documenting transactions so early,鈥� he says. It
suggests life on the frontier might have been surprisingly civilised.
The text appears on a wooden tablet, one of 150 found at the settlement
Vindolanda, near where Hadrian鈥檚 Wall was later built. The Romans coated the
tablets with wax and wrote on them with a metal stylus, which also left very
faint scratch marks in the wood.
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Making sense of the scratch marks has been a challenge. They are very shallow
because they weren鈥檛 made intentionally. The tablets were designed to be reused
by scraping off the wax and pouring on a new layer. The marks are also obscured
by the grain of the wood and by stains and discoloration that have accumulated
over the years.
So Bowman turned to Oxford engineer Michael Brady for help. Brady used a
high-resolution digital camera to take pictures of the tablets lit from
different angles. He developed software to analyse the images, tracking how the
shadows changed and using a technique called phase congruence to pick out the
faint stylus marks.
鈥淲hen you deal with ancient written documents, they鈥檙e very rarely perfectly
preserved and you have problems picking out which marks correspond to writing,鈥�
says Charles Crowther, an archaeologist at Oxford University.
Technology that makes the task easier would be welcome, agrees Ann Brownlee,
an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania. 鈥淲ritten evidence is
precious because there鈥檚 just not that much of it, and it鈥檚 material that鈥檚
actually made by the people of the period. They鈥檙e a very direct link to the
culture,鈥� she says.
Bowman says deciphering more of the Vindolanda tablets should provide clues
about the nature of the day-to-day lives of Romans at the frontier, and the
structure of their society.