Vindolanda Trust
It’s likely that you read at least one of the numerous media reports last month that a 2,000-year-old “dildo” may have been found near the remains of a Roman auxiliary fort called Vindolanda in England. , it’s a dildo. A pestle used to grind culinary, cosmetic, or medicinal ingredients. Or those intended to be inserted into statues and rubbed for good luck (a common Roman practice), so concluded the author of his February paper published in Antiquity, anyway. But there is another possible explanation here. The phallic-shaped artifact could be a drop-he spindle used to spin thread.
As previously reported, the Vindolanda site is located south of the defensive fortress known as Hadrian’s Wall. An paleontologist named William Camden recorded the site’s existence in a 1586 treatise. Over the next 200 years, many people visited the site, and in 1702 a military bath was discovered, and in 1715 an altar was discovered. The Reverend Anthony Hedley began excavating the site in 1814, but he died before he could record his findings for posterity. Another altar discovered in 1914 confirmed that the fort was called Vindolanda.
Serious archaeological excavations at the site began in the 1930s under the direction of Eric Burley. Burley’s son and grandson continued the work after his death to this day. The oxygen-poor conditions of the sediments (some of which extend to 6 meters (19 feet) below ground) mean that recovered artifacts are very well preserved. These include a wooden writing board and over 100 boxwood combs, which must have long ago decomposed in oxygen-rich conditions.
The site is most famous for the so-called Vindolanda tablet, one of the oldest surviving handwritten documents in the UK. Discovered in 1973, these thin, postcard-sized leaves are written in carbon-based ink. Most of the documents are official military correspondence and personal messages from the garrison to their families, revealing many details about life at the fort. The most famous is Tablet 291, written around AD 100 by the wife of a commander named Claudia Severa who was in charge of a nearby fort. It is addressed to Sulpicia Lepidina, invites her to a birthday party, and represents one of the earliest known examples of a woman writing in Latin.
Phalluses were ubiquitous in ancient Rome as they were believed to ward off evil. At Vindolanda alone, he has 13 phallic carvings, more than any other excavation site along Hadrian’s Wall.
For example, last year archaeologists excavating in Vindolanda found a small stone carved with an unmistakable image of a penis. It’s basically a d**k photo of ancient Rome with a vulgar and insulting message.Experts in Roman inscriptions attributed this character to the second hunterwhich (ahem) translates to “Secundinus, shit”. is.
