Enlarge / Archaeologists found a crude graffiti drawing of a penis accompanied by a personal insult at the ancient Roman fort Vindolanda. (credit: Vindolana Charitable Trust)
Archaeologists excavating the remains of a Roman auxiliary fort in the UK recently made a surprising and rather hilarious find: a small stone carved with the unmistakable image of penis—basically an ancient Roman d**k pic, accompanied by a crude insulting message directed at someone the carver clearly disliked.
The Vindolanda site is located south of the defense fortification known as Hadrian's Wall. An antiquarian named William Camden recorded the existence of the ruins in a 1586 treatise. Over the next 200 years, many people visited the site, discovering a military bathhouse in 1702 and an altar in 1715. The Rev. Anthony Hedley began excavating the site in 1814, but he died before he had the chance to record what he found for posterity. Another altar found in 1914 confirmed that the fort had been called Vindolanda.
Serious archaeological excavation at the site began in the 1930s under the leadership of Eric Birley, whose sons and grandson continued the work after his death, right up to the present day. The oxygen-deprived conditions of the deposits (some of which extend six meters, or 19 feet, into the earth) mean that the recovered artifacts are remarkably well-preserved. These include wooden writing tablets and over a hundred boxwood combs, which would have disintegrated long ago in more oxygen-rich conditions.
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