Sharjah24 - AFP: Nineteen hundred years after it was built to keep out barbarian hordes, archaeologists at Hadrian's Wall in northern England are facing a new enemy -- climate change, which threatens its vast treasure trove of Roman artefacts.
Thousands of soldiers and many of their families lived around the 73-mile (118-kilometre) stone wall, which crosses England from west coast to east coast, marking the limit of the Roman Empire and forming Britain's largest Roman archaeological feature.
The wall was begun in 122 AD during the reign of emperor Hadrian and marked the boundary between Roman Britannia and unconquered Caledonia, helping to keep barbarian raiders out of the empire.
The Roman soldiers who lived there left behind not just wooden structures but the fascinating detritus of everyday life that allows archaeologists today to reconstruct how they lived in the windswept north of the empire.
They include the fort of Vindolanda, some 33 miles west of the modern day city of Newcastle upon Tyne, a Roman settlement at the original eastern end of the wall, then named Pons Aelius.
"A lot of the landscapes at Hadrian's Wall are preserved under peat bog and marsh -- very wet, very moist ground, which has protected the archaeology for almost two millennia," Andrew Birley, director of excavations and chief executive of the Vindolanda Trust, told AFP.
"But as global warming takes place, climate change takes place," he added.
The ground heats up more rapidly than the air temperature, caking the previously moist soil and letting oxygen in through the resulting cracks.
"When that oxygen gets in there, things that are really delicate, that are made of leather, textile, items of wood, crack, decay and are lost forever," said Birley.
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