The anaerobic conditions of the soil at Vindolanda have conserved a large collection of leather objects used during the Roman life of the fort and garrison. It is the biggest collection of leather items found anywhere in the Roman empire - and it is being added to each year as new objects are excavated. The collection is dominated by Roman footwear - boots, shoes, sandals, slippers, bath clogs of varying different sizes and types, some of which are clearly women and children. Other artefacts include a Roman ceremonial horse chamfron and many other leather goods including buckets, bags, purses and an archer's thumb guard, as well as at least three leather military tents. About 6,000 leather pieces have been found at the site.
The Vindolanda Tablets are a collection of Roman documents, many of them fragments, dating from 90 AD to the 120s AD. There are about 1,600 fragments, which have been written in ink on wooden sheets. The writing includes private letters written by the soldiers and their families stationed at Vindolanda, as well as store lists, writing exercises and garrison strength reports.
These documents written on wood have been preserved at Vindolanda because of the special conditions at the site, where several Roman military camps have been built over a period of time one on top of the other. This layering of building materials, along with clay in the ground, has created sealed pockets deep in the ground with little oxygen circulating. These anaerobic conditions – where there is no oxidisation – means that materials such as leather, textiles, wood, plant matter and metals are very well preserved.
The first tablets were found at Vindolanda in 1973 and excavators have been finding batches of tablets ever since when working at the right anaerobic levels. In the early 1980s the Vindolanda Trust decided that it was in the best interest of the tablets that they go to the British Museum, although the Vindolanda Museum will be in a position to put some of the tablets back on display from March 2011, following funding and a refurbishment.
Earlier this month 
