Bloomberg tablets

The Bloomberg tablets are a collection of 405 preserved wooden tablets that were found at the site of the Bloomberg building in the financial district of London. Excavations of the site took place between 2010 and 2013, after which the current Bloomberg building was constructed atop the archaeological dig. The tablets are the earliest written documents found in Britain, dating from 50 to 80 AD in the early Roman period. Notably, these tablets predate the Vindolanda tablets, which were previously the earliest writing examples found in Britain, dating to 100 AD or later.

The Bloomberg site consists of three acres in what was the Roman city of Londinium. The archaeological site had previously yielded a 3rd-century Temple of Mithras, which was partially excavated in the 1950s, but this effort was incomplete, and Bucklersbury House, a 14-storey modernist office block, was built atop the site in 1953. However, the demolition of the Bucklersbury building in 2010 gave archaeologists a chance to reopen the dig. Between 2010 and 2013, a multitude of artefacts were discovered at the site, including the Bloomberg tablets, discovered buried 40 feet underground.

The Bloomberg tablets were an unexpected find, as organic material such as wood and leather tends to rot away and disintegrate with time. The tablets were preserved by the thick, wet mud generated by the underground river Walbrook, which limited the exposure of the tablets to oxygen.

The tablets were originally made of wood and wax, though only the wood was preserved and recoverable. A typical tablet would have been made of a thin piece of wood, 15–25 cm wide, with a rectangular depression carved into the centre. Warm, blackened beeswax would then be poured into the centre depression and allowed to cool. Once the wax has set, a metal stylus would be used to scratch letters into the wax. These wax tablets could also be recycled, in that the tablet could be heated (to approximately 50 °C), allowing the wax to soften and reform a smooth writing surface. The tablets were likely made from wood recycled from barrels, and often were made in diptych style, where two tablets were loosely linked and could fold together to close, like a book with only two pages, protecting the soft wax on the inside.

Although the wax from the tablets was not preserved, small scratches left on the surface of the wooden tablets allowed for a recreation of the original writing content. These scratches, though perhaps not identifiable with the naked eye, can be visualised and digitally recreated with the assistance of technology. To make the digital recreation of the writing, photographs were taken using different angles of light and thus casting different shadows upon the tablet surface. Once compiled, these pictures gave a precise view of the surface contours of the tablets, the impressions made in the wood, and thus a look at what was written on the tablet. However, since these tablets were made to be reusable, several overlapping messages may be present on the tablets, making it even more difficult to separate and translate the many messages.

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Wikipedia