Letters from a Roman fort · Grades 6–8

The passage and its 7 questions

Directions: Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions in full sentences.

• In 1973, archaeologists digging at Vindolanda, a Roman fort in northern England, found thin slivers of wood in a damp trench. At first they looked like scraps. When two of the pieces were gently peeled apart, faint ink marks appeared. They were letters, written nearly 2,000 years ago.
• The tablets date from around 100 CE, shortly before Hadrian's Wall was built nearby.
• Soldiers from many parts of the empire served at the fort, including units whose homelands were in what are now the Netherlands and Belgium. Wood usually rots away, but at Vindolanda layers of wet, airless soil kept the tablets from decaying. More than a thousand have now been found. Some ink was so faded that experts used infrared photographs to read it.
• What do the letters say? Many are wonderfully ordinary. One soldier received a parcel of socks, sandals and underwear. Officers ordered supplies, including grain and beer.
• One report describes how the local Britons fight and calls them by a mocking nickname,
• 'little Britons.' The most famous tablet is a birthday invitation from a woman named
• Claudia Severa to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina. A scribe wrote most of it, but Claudia added a few lines in her own hand, among the earliest known writing in Latin by a woman.
• For historians, these tablets are precious primary sources. Most Roman writing that survives was produced by wealthy men and copied by hand over many centuries. The
• Vindolanda letters are different. They are originals, written quickly by people far from
• Rome who never expected anyone else to read them. Still, historians ask careful questions. Who wrote each letter, and why? A soldier's complaint shows one point of view, not the whole truth. By comparing tablets with each other and with objects found at the fort, historians build a fuller picture of life on the edge of an empire.
• 1. What was found at Vindolanda in 1973, and why had it survived?
• 2. Why are the Vindolanda tablets called primary sources?
• 3. How are these letters different from most Roman writing that survives, and why does that matter?
• 4. In paragraph 3, a report uses a 'mocking nickname.' What does 'mocking' mean, and what does the nickname reveal about the writer?
• 5. Copy the sentence that shows how historians check what a single tablet tells them.
• 6. If you could add one modern object to an archive for historians 2,000 years from now, what would it be and why?
• 7. Write a one-paragraph summary that a younger student could understand.