Roman Military Records from Vindolanda

Abstract

The following group of wooden writing tablets is part of the discovery made by Mr. Robin Birley at Vindolanda during the summer of 1973. A brief description of the size and nature of the find is given elsewhere in this volume (pp. 471-4), along with some examples of tablets in the collection. It is planned that the tablets will ultimately be published as a corpus in a volume of the Excavation Report for the site of Vindolanda. In the meantime, however, it is sensible and desirable that some information about the contents of this unique discovery should be made available. The following items are therefore offered as a forerunner to the eventual full publication of the corpus. The aim is to give some account of the progress so far made with these difficult documents and, not less important, to offer scholars an opportunity to scrutinize, criticize and add pertinent information in the hope that they might be later republished in a fuller and better form. This preliminary edition inevitably contains many imperfections and blemishes, as well as problems to which no adequate solution has yet been found. But it is hoped that the importance of the documents justifies the desire to make them available as speedily as is possible, without unduly hampering the completion of what will inevitably be a fairly long-term project.