Oh how much I want you at my birthday party. You’ll make the day so much more fun. I do so hope you can make it. Goodbye sister, my dearest soul.
Claudia Severa, inviting her sister Lepidina to her birthday party
It can be a sobering experience to realise what little trace our ancestors have left of their lives. When we pass, our family and friends will remember us well, but our grandchildren less so, and beyond that perhaps only fragments of memories remain. Perhaps we will be lucky and make some grand contribution to society that is remembered for generations but, as Bill Bryson has so memorably written, we don’t even know if England’s greatest bard spelled his name Shakespeare or Shakespear – or even when he was born. The Mayan civilisation once covered the whole of the Yucatán Peninsula, but we still don’t know why it collapsed. Closer to home, we can only guess what the stone rows and circles of Dartmoor were used for, the hut circles once inhabited now broken and scattered to the moor.
Now we live in a digital age, with our photos carefully backed up to huge servers, warehouses filled with microchips to collect our every action and memory. We are comforted by the knowledge that we will never be deleted, that our memories will never fade. But will those servers still be accessible in a hundred or a thousand years? One of the joys of geology is the contemplation of deep time, life bursting into existence, mass extinctions, and humanity barely even making it into the last scene in the great play of life. In the vast enormity of space and time, all we really have are the shared moments that tie us all together.
So the mundane remains of everyday life from ages past have a profound rarity and value. A note, a baby’s shoe, a boxing glove – all with tales to tell. They connect us directly to a person just like us. We can imagine Claudia’s excitement at her birthday party (11th September, around 100AD, at Vindolanda in Northumberland if you’re free), her optimism that her sister could maybe join her, the laughter and love that flowed when Lepidina arrived. I like to think that she did, by the way. I don’t like to think of Claudia feeling sad, missing her friend on her birthday. I hope the wine flowed, the sun shone and she had a wonderful day.
Every time we rediscover an object like this, we keep someone somewhere alive.
According to archaeologists, climate change is threatening some of these rare windows into the past. Organic finds such as Claudia’s note are much more common in peat soil, where the lack of oxygen helps to stop them from rotting. Warmer, drier conditions dry out and desiccate the peat, meaning it erodes and crumbles away, destroying anything preserved in it. At Magna, close to Vindolanda, archaeologists say that they have lost up to a metre’s depth of peat in places. Our fragmented connections with our ancestors are at risk.
For more about some of the find at Vindolanda and the surrounding area, and the impact that peat degradation could have on this treasure trove of stories, take a look at the article Climate change threatening buried UK treasures on the BBC website.