Routine documents never meant for posterity (duty rosters, supply accounts, strength reports, requests for leave) expose the actual texture of army administration more faithfully than the literary histories written for an audience. The accidental survival of discarded paperwork gives direct access to operations that polished narratives either omit or distort.
The Vindolanda finds show that thin slivers of wood with ink were a standard, cheap, disposable medium for ordinary correspondence and accounts, distinct from the wax-filled stylus tablets long assumed to dominate. The medium's fragility means its survival is exceptional, implying that most such everyday writing across the empire has simply perished.
Reading the tablets foregrounds beer, grain, boots, nails, and sick lists rather than battles, so that Roman control of a frontier appears as a problem of procurement, inventory, and manpower accounting. Seen this way, the garrison's strength is a question of how many soldiers are actually present and supplied, not of abstract military prestige.