Vindolanda was a Roman fort in northern England - Hadrian's wall was built just to the north of it. Unusual conditions caused an amazing amount of organic material to be preserved from the 100 C.E. time period, including hundreds of fragmentary documents - ink on thin strips of wood.

This book includes photographic reproductions of dozens of these documents. I am fascinated by paleography but have no expertise at all. It was exceedingly challenging to look at this ancient writing and compare it to the transcription provided, to try to make out which little mark is a "c" and which an "e", for example.

The book starts with a quick modern history of the site - when people first recognized it as a Roman ruin and when excavations revealed the soggy treasures - they were all under water, in anaerobic conditions, like a bog. This discovery is only from around 1970.

The book then reviews the local terrain and how the fort is situated relative to the other Roman forts in northern England and in Scotland. It discusses the various movements of Roman troops in Britain in the first couple of Centuries C.E.

The main body of the book is a review of the contents of the letters. There is a lot of talk about buying and selling of basic supplies. There is talk too of people traveling to visit each other. These documents are not literature, not intended for any audience beyond the recipient. They are just letters and probably account records.

Birley stays quite close to the documents themselves, He does guess at meanings and tries to fill in the blank spaces. But he is careful to distinguish what the documents say from his guesses. There is no grand narrative here, beyond the raw historical sequence of troops arriving and leaving, the soldiers and their officers and the regional government. Birley sorts the documents topically and then just surveys their contents, focusing on the more complete ones.

That such a collection of documents survives from that time is rather amazing. Birley does a nice job of sharing that treasure with his readers. It's probably the best unvarnished look available of day to day life on the frontier of the Roman Empire. ( )