Period 11

Here we will post regular updates on the current excavations and post excavation taking place on site here at Magna Roman Fort during Period 11 of the 2026 excavation season.

24th August

We are so excited to welcome our new Period 11 crew onto site for the start of their next two weeks with us. We’ve only got a month left of the 2026 excavation season, how time has flown!

We’re excited to see what the crew uncover in the next two weeks, but if you missed it you can catch up on the Magna Excavations update #5 on our YouTube channel below. Sophie

26th August

A brilliant mix of eager new crew members and lovely returning faces has brought fantastic new energy to our wonderful site this week! The gang has been pushing even further east because, in true archaeological fashion, our praetorium’s eastern wall is turning out to be much further away than we originally suspected.

 It really is quite a substantial building in every single direction! While on the hunt for that elusive wall, the team has been doing some exquisite fine-detailing work on a set of rooms that popped up along the way. Meanwhile, another hard working group bound for the east has been busy stripping away layers of antiquarian backfill in the south-eastern quadrant. They’re working to reveal more of the late drainage system and follow any intriguing walls or paved surfaces peeking through. Over in the north-west, our crew is soldiering through (no pun intended I promise) the Post-Roman ‘dark earth’ to see if we can finally bring those Late Roman structures underneath to light through the dense clay and soil.

Despite all that heavy lifting, it’s only Day 3 and the finds desk is already buzzing! The site has been exceptionally generous this week, yielding a fantastic array of treasures such as a lovely piece of graffito scratched into some CBM (Ceramic Building Material). A beautiful Samian pottery stamp preserved on the base of a bowl.  A very intriguing copper-alloy linked chain, another bone hair pin , a fantastic pilum , a belt fitting ,  plus even more Lorica Squamata (Roman scale armour, we can never have too much!).

It’s been a sensational start to the week. The site is yielding brilliant clues, the team is in high spirits, and we can’t wait to see what the rest of the week holds! Tommy

28th August

You can definitely tell we’re nearing the end of the season here at Magna as the weather has finally started to get cooler (and windier!), though thankfully the rain has mostly held off this week.

As we’re entering the final few weeks of the dig, one of the main goals across the site is uncovering as much of the surviving structure as possible, to help us better understand how the building was used and adapted by its inhabitants over time. In some rooms this means embarking on what I have named “wall quests” – excavating places where collapse and stone robbing has removed key wall junctions, making it difficult to work out what order they were built in and how the spaces might have looked. Elsewhere, the final areas of antiquarian backfill are being removed exposing more of the hypocaust heating system and a section of collapsed wall with a large panel of white painted plaster still intact on its surface!

Over in the western wing of the building, a new team has taken up the challenge of revealing the rooms buried around 1800 years ago. If you’ve been following the dig diary over the summer, you will already know that we’ve been working on this area for the past few months with the help of so many of our fab volunteers who have got stuck in and shifted a huge amount of earth and stone rubble. All their hard work is definitely paying off though, as we can now see the footprint of the southwestern corner room and a courtyard space to the north of it – and more of the drains defining the latter have been emerging in the last few days.

With three weeks to go there are still plenty of questions waiting to be answered here at Magna, and I’m sure we’ll have a few more surprises along the way! Rachel

4th September

It’s been a whirlwind (almost literally) end of the week for our Period 11 excavations at Magna. We’ve had many an amazing find, whether that be a wagon wheel brooch, unfinished bone handle, or more walls to add to our collection!

Excavation highlights from this week include expanding our early praetorium courtyard and finding the doorway to this area. Underneath this courtyard we have glimpses of our Hadrianic walls, indicating that this area was not always used as a courtyard. We’ve also found the northern wall to the private bath suites which contained the caldarium and another rot-preventing drain.

Continued excavations in many of the rooms have helped elucidate their usage as well. A later room containing dwarf walls for ventilation and a chamber pot in the corner was likely a storage room for either perishable food or armour – the lack of metal finds suggests the former. Dwarf walls are typically found in headquarter buildings (such as at Vindolanda), barrack rooms, and, classically, the granaries. They provide underfloor ventilation which aids airflow to prevent rotting and thus are, of course, very necessary in the Northumberland climate. Additional excavation in another praetorium room suggests that the area was possibly used for smelting – a feature which is also evident in the praetorium at Vindolanda.

With only two weeks (!!) left of the excavation season, we are rushing to get as much done as possible before we prepare the site for the winter. We’re still eagerly searching for the eastern wall of the praetorium and the private latrine as well. And with that, the torch of the Period 11 team is now passed to our final Period 12 excavation team to complete the praetorium footprint! Franki