beautiful, look at the pile of coins !!

Awesome. What I wouldn't give to be there and watch that stuff come out of the dirt. And I don't even mean that in a greedy "I'd grab all the coins!" way (though quite naturally those thoughts would cross my mind at first).

No, I would love to be one of the people with a trowel or brush, gently revealing the long-buried secrets of all those wonderful things. I'd be an unpaid volunteer to experience that.

 

Oh, I've read about Vindolanda, and seen video. Amazing! And the climate in the UK actually suits me better. I've had the pleasure of digging over there once.

 

I do hope you'll share some pictures. I totally understand about the knee thing and am in the same boat with you. Sadly, I think my active detecting days are behind me, though I still have a machine and will still try to get out a couple of times a year.

I dreamed of being an archaeologist when I was a teenager. That never happened, of course. In retrospect, I think my unfulfilled potential would not be as an archaeologist so much as a conservator or curator who has hands-on with lots of artifacts. It's the artifacts that "speak" to me, which is how I ended up a coin collector in the first place. I think everyone hear has some inkling of what I'm talking about.

But of course a lot of archaeology deals with stratigraphy and dendrochronology and pollen analysis and faunal remains and all that scientific stuff. I follow that to a very small degree as an archaeo-wannabe reader, but I'm not so sure I'd have the stamina for the hard science end of it. Like so many of us coin folks, I've got a bit more of an aesthetic/artistic/romantic tendency.