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Just learned a Roman fort in Scotland was held for only 8 years and I can't stop thinking about the manpower
I was killing time between loads in a truck stop outside Laramie last week and got sucked into a documentary about Vindolanda, the Roman fort down near Hadrian's Wall. The part that hit me was the numbers. They figure the garrison there rotated through something like 1,000 soldiers at a time, and the place only stayed occupied for about 8 years before they pulled out and flattened it. Eight years. That's one career for a guy who enlisted at 18. I keep picturing those wooden tablets they dug up, birthday invites and supply requests and somebody complaining about the roads, all written by people who figured they'd be there forever. A site that size needs wells, latrines, a bathhouse, a command post, and all of it got torn down and buried so fast the next fort went up on the same spot. What gets me is how much of what we know comes from trash pits they left behind, not from anything the empire meant to save. For those who follow Roman Britain stuff, is 8 years typical for a frontier fort or was Vindolanda a weird case?
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kelly_west741mo ago
Eight years sounds weird until you remember most frontier forts were never meant to be permanent, they were made of wood and turf and got rebuilt every decade or so when they rotted out. Vindolanda actually lasted way longer than that overall, it just got rebuilt a bunch of times, so the 8 year thing is one phase, not the whole story. What's really rare is the trash pits, because waterlogged ground in Britain saves stuff that turns to dust anywhere else in the empire. So the big find isn't that a fort got torn down fast, it's that we got lucky this one had the right dirt.
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