The Early River Thames: The Iron Age and Before - Jon Cotton

I walked along the South Bank from watero this afternoon and as I was walking along what kept running through my mind was firstly the lecture I had to give but secondly that poem that rard Kipling uh put into a school history of England in 1911 uh a school history of England uh was written by um chap called Charles Fletcher Fletcher invited k to Counterpoint his text with a number of poems and the first of these and possibly one of the best known of course is the river's tale some of the lines of which you see up on the screen here now Kipling being Kipling profer a bit of advice to Fletcher in his text he said um he said I suggest you shorten up that fascinating animal Neolithic man and give the kids more about the Romans well I'm going to ignore Raj K's advice and give you nothing about the Romans but lots about Neolithic man and his co-s who populated the temps Valley in prehistory so with apologies to uh Mr Kipling let's make a little start now I suspect that you in your heads have your own favorite views of the river temps which is an icon of London an icon of Britain really here is my grab bag of images some of which you're probably familiar with because the river has performed a whole range of functions it's been a platform for pageantry for power and for protest and some of those images you can see up on the screen I suspect speak to some of that we've got our you know our East Enders we've got our New Year's Eve celebrations on the south bank now uh we've got Turners uh fighting tamare we've got that iconic image of the German plane over the London docks and of course we've got those two gentlemen at the bottom right exchanging their views in the current sort of situation leading up to the uh the referendum a month or two back so those are sort of images that I have in my head when I think of the temps and I dare say you will have your own images but there are some other images other less iconic images which have rather more resonance to what I want to tell you this afternoon and I show them here here now back in 2014 the winter of 2014 we had lots and lots of flooding um in the lower part of the temps Valley and here are some of the images uh which come from that the one that the one in the middle there this image here is the TS at shepperton in the winter of 2014 this lady is doing her shopping in Twickenham she's just making her way to wait Ros out of the car park the little little dog is uh looking less than impressed uh we've got doish as well of course you'll remember the collapse of the the main Railway line down to Cornwall and of course as usual Private Eyes stepped in with a view of the uh the drought minister or environment Minister visiting Somerset and inspecting the somerset levels the picture at the top left of the screen provides a little bit of historical context because it's a view of people being evacuated from flooding parts of Lamberth in 1928 they're being taken out of their houses their basement Flats um during uh the the um T's embankments failed at Lambeth 14 people were drowned in their basement flats and over 4,000 were made homeless now that flooding is a key image or key concept or key fact that I want to come back to at the end of the lecture and give you some indication of how prehistoric communities coat with a very similar set of circumstances back in the Bronze Age so I want you to if you will keep those images in your mind's eye we will return again at the end of the talk now there are various ways of thinking about the Ts for a Londoner and for a Londoner I gu guess and I would imagine that most of you are londoners I'm certainly a Londoner you chart your way around the capital city with reference to the temps you're either a North Londoner or a South Londoner there's no there's no two ways about it you live North the river or you live south of the river you work north of the river you work south of the river try getting a a South London cabie to go north or vice versa and I always feel that the peculiar antipathy between Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal football clubs stems from the fact that Arsenal started out as woit Arsenal a South London team who Moved north of the river into Tottenham territory in 1913 so this north south divide is one that every Londoner will recognize I can see one or two nods in the audience so I'm not alone but I say I'm a proud South Londoner [Music] I'm thank you one or two cheers so we've got a north south divide but I want to get you to think not in not in terms of just the north south divide but also an eastwest divide an upu River and a down river a non-tidal and a tidal temps because those are two key Concepts which are absolutely crucial to our understanding of the way prehistoric communities viewed their River and we'll come back again as I come back to that at the end now up River here's a couple of here's a couple of images which for me sum up the up River idil if you like we've got that absolutely fantastic painting on the left of the picture uh which is bney lock Sunday afternoon by Edward Gregory Gregory was not a fast painter and this painting took him something like 15 years he started off in 1882 and it was only finally exhibited in 1897 but to me it I I can never show that picture without thinking of Jerome K Jerome's three men in a boat which was 1889 I think um because it shows the Henry's and the Henrietta showing off out on the River on a Sunday afternoon the chaps on the right of the slide of course are eaten College rowers they're out on the river uh as part of the pro procession of boats held every year on the anniversary of George III's birthday June the 4th the idea is they row out into Midstream stand up in their boats bring their ORS fully vertical and then take their hats off and Shake flowers into the river you can imagine the camcorders are woring away waiting for them all to go over so those two images for me a sort of Sunday supplement rural idil could be taken to summarize the the non- tidal River the U River temps Upstream as it were of Teddington as it now is that's that's where the the the tidal head currently ends and we'll come back to Tidal heads a little bit later on down river the scene changes the mood changes and these two images again for me best summarize the down river river the the the tidal River uh the river of politics uh of trade of tragedy um think of deenan the deenan river people out hauling suicides out of the out of the River Bank out of the river stream the picture on the left of the screen is a fantastic picture too in its own right by Christopher nanson simply called winter 1928 and it's in this mu this Museum's collections I'm not sure if it's actually currently on display but it's a fabulous picture one of a pair this one was painted by nanson as the title suggests in 1928 and the painter says that he worked into this picture something that stuck in his mind he been he'd been taken into London at the height of the great freeze of 1895 and he like other londoners was absolutely astonished to see the number of seabirds number of gulls flying in and along the river they'd been driven in Land by the harshness of that cold snap in 1895 and he used them to populate his picture withstanding The View Viewpoint is more or less the sort of bridge foot of waterl looking Downstream towards St Paul's which you can see just on the uh just on the horizon uh top left the second picture is a a picture of the the single largest Maritime tragedy ever to occur in British Waters and this is the Princess Alice disaster of 1878 where uh a steam packet boat packed with Trippers who were just coming back from a out in wital they were coming back up River were hit a mid ships by the ball Castle a colier cut the cut the boat in two the whole lot sank the final death toll was never really established because there was no there was no list of passengers but over 600 people or 600 bodies were taken out of the river over the next few months after that after that disaster uh and one thinks of course in terms of our own day the maranes disaster back in 1989 there people drowned but that was right in the heart right in the heart of by sou Bridge so we've got two contrasting images there and two contrasting ideas of the temps an up River temps a Down River temps a non-title temps and a tidal temps and that distinction is an important one because that tidal head is a Movable Feast as we shall see when we come back towards the end of the end of the talk okay now the TS function fed in different ways for the communities who lived along its banks the first uh item we need to think about is the TS is a shaper of landscape the temps shapes the landscape of the of the temps Valley a landscape we're all familiar with or live within what we're perhaps less familiar with is the notion that the TS actually started life the headwaters of the TS started life back in the ice age in the uh North Welsh area and flowed across uh to join the bthm river which is one of the Great Rivers of Northern Europe uh in the Ice Age It's we've never had another River quite like it in terms of size and scale the bthm is here which runs out into the middle of what is now the southern part of the North Sea Basin the TS originally started life here and joined the by them the anglian Ice Age the anglian GLA which occurred around about 480,000 years or so ago pushed the ice sheets down across across Britain down through here destroyed the bthm completely took the bthm completely out of the equation and moov the temps down into the valley that it currently occupies so that's a big step change in the way that the hydrology worked in in ice AG Britain the destruction of the BAM River and the creation of the TS now the TS then proceeded to adjust its course and its level in relation to various changes in land subsidence and sea level relative sea level rise so it's a complicated a complicated equation don't ask me to explain it because I'm not a geomorphologist but there are thousands and thousands of words spilt on that trying to unpick that equation so we've got ENT what we have is the TS laying down various beds of gravel in its flood plain and those beds of gravel essentially the higher in Al altitude those beds of gravel are the earlier in the sequence they come as the T sort of progressively cuts down into its former flood Plains you can see this quite well actually in trafala square of all places because if you stand by The Fountains you're standing in one flood plane of the temps which was created around about 115 120,000 years ago and you're looking up towards what is now the National Gallery to the next Terrace up which would have been laid down around about 300,000 years or so ago so you've got a slice of of London ply toine stratigraphy quite neatly in the middle of the West End now those gravel Terraces which were laid down essentially are the sweepings of land surfaces which the t's has Flushed Away so what we have huge beds of gravel and this again I reach for John lel's fabulous picture of Kensington gravel pits believe it or not this is quite close to Kensington Palace he painted this in 1811 to 1812 it's a fantastic picture um which is huge in scale and in fact the the image on the screen there is probably slightly less than life size it's in Tate Britain and it's worth a look in its own right not surprisingly though given its subject matter lenel found it quite difficult to sell it was not a subject that appealed to the painting buying public uh of the uh of the Georgian period so it went unsold for quite a long time but it's a fantastic image now what's going on here is these gentlemen are digging the gravel Terraces out by hand and because they're digging them out by hand and they have every opportunity to pick up objects of interest to them bones or Flint Tools in particular these days of course gravel extraction is mechanized and there's very little chance of spotting stuff except as it's whizzing along the conveyor conveyor belt to the crusher but here the chaps are digging by hand and large numbers thousands and thousands of Flint tools were recovered by that means now London bids Fair of course to be the Cradle of research into the pic because it is the scene of the first discovery of one of these uh handaxes these biface Flint tools uh of which we have now so many thousands in museums and the top uh left of the screen there you see an etching of a hand ax found in the grazing Road in 1690 by a London Apothecary John Conor who was digging for gravel along well what is now the king's Cross Road essentially but it's he described it more colorfully as opposite black Marys at the sign of s John old castle in the fields that handex astonishingly survives and the bottom slide on the left there is the actual object itself now in the collections of the British museum the etching at the top dates from 1715 and you can see they've got it broadly right it's sort of pointy and sort of um you know triangular shaped but anyway the other point as well of course is that very very occasionally human remains turn up in these gravels uh and the slide at the top of the right of the screen there is Chris Stringer holding uh three parts of a female skull which was recovered from the gravels at um swansom near Dartford in Kent in 1935 1936 and 1955 so these three bits of skull were found 20 years apart in those gravels they may well have been more bits of this skull actually but the gravels down at swansen were dug out to make up the mulbury harbors which were towed out to Normandy as part of D-Day so possibly somewhere off the North French Coast is the rest of shepher and woman's head and of course the bottom slide on the on the right there shows Ned the neandertal um on display at the British museum in their 1 million years story of Britain exhibition which I'm sure many of you will seen but a fabulous exhibition it was too so we've got TS shaping the landscape we've got it shaping the landscape in subtler ways again which brings us back to sea level rise and tidle head migration here's peeps in his diary 22nd September 1665 to Black Wall he says we enter Johnson's house Johnson is the dock Master at Black Wall where he tells us digging his late dock he did 12T underground ground find perfect trees over covered with Earth the diary entry goes on to describe these trees some of which are clearly U trees which they found extremely difficult to cut with using iron adses they were so hard also Hazel trees some of which some of whose branches had the very nuts upon them peep says together with Ivy twine twined around some of the some of the trees some of the branches what peeps was being shown here was a section of drowned Forest of probably nearly thick or Bronze Age date Forest that have been overtaken by Rising River levels at a time of global warming and climatic change slide on the right of the screen there is my colleague barley Sloan who was also once of this Parish um poking at a rather unpromising bit of brown sludge under what is now the Millennium bridge this is the the Millennium Bridge there was a pre- um construction excavation to assess the archaeology of the foreshore bar is looking there at a small slice of another one of these bits of drowned Forest this one is composed of Alder car and has a radiocarbon date of around about I think off the top of my head it's around about 2100 2200 calendar Years BC so we're talking sort of early part of the Bronze Age but another chunk of one of these Dred forest and for those of you who want to know what a drowned Forest looks like in its Heyday here's a bit of modern older car this would have been I think this one's down from on haling island or somewhere like that but the interesting thing about these drowned forests as well of course is they have lots of U trees in them U trees and oak trees which is a very curious combination which according to Jane sadell and other people who've looked into this doesn't appear to have any modern equivalent so it's a very odd mixture of trees we've got down on that flood plane in the Neolithic and Bronze Age another way in which the CHS has changed its course you can by map progression looking at Old maps you can very occasionally spot um ways in which the temps has changed in historic times or even prehistoric times here we've got a slice of this is the map of London part of the map of London drawn by Jean Rog in the middle of the 18th century about 1750 1754 we've got the modern channel the modern channel of the temps running through here at brenford we've got San house there but we've also got this little channel here running through uh and that's a view of from one of the planes coming into herro um so it's very clear that there's something odd going on here now excavations undertaken by Moler in s house in sign Gardens sign Park as part of a a a research piece of work that they took undertook with Burke Beck uh managed to section part of that channel and here you see it here it's something like 100 m wide and about 2 to 3 m deep seems to be an Ice Age channel of the temps which has been later reused uh By The River crane as in the lower part of its course interestingly so we've got the TS changing its landscape but interestingly we've got evidence of people changing the temps in this instance because when he was employed um in the 18th century by the Duke of Northumberland Lancelot capability Brown used that channel as an ornamental lake so we've got a reuse of an Ice Age channel of the TS reused by the crane re reused by capability Brown as a landscape feat so next time you go into s Park just have a look and you'll see see this this ancient Channel repurposed as an ornamental Lake there are other ways of changing the TS too most of which come from beaver um and this is a typical Beaver Lodge so these these these animals are Architects every bit as uh every bit as influential in their way as capability Brown was uh the the I think the Beaver Lodge is actually in Patagonia but we've got good archaeological evidence for Beaver lodges and beaver dams along the TS Valley uh there was an excavation at Eaton College rowing lake lake before the construction of the of the rowing um course um excavated located and excavated a Beaver Lodge and near lithic Beaver Lodge and even found a skeleton of a beaver actually inside it which is rather nice we've got another Beaver Dam or Beaver Lodge rather under the a13 in Canning Town of all places on the edge of the flood plane and various other pieces of beaver chewed wood very distinctive way they chew the wood at places like runny me um so we've got good evidence for beavers in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age also organizing the TS channels right so we've got the TS as a shap of landscape the second issue I want to touch on here is the temps uh as a provider of resources and I show here rather nice uh cartoon and a quote from Sydney Smith in his usual sort of piy fashion the cartoon is by uh William Heath Paul pry uh and is dated 1828 and for those of you who can't read it at the back it says Monster Soup being a a a representation of t or being a a representation of that of that stuff doled out to us what you've got here is a lady in a mob cap looking through one of those new fangled microscopes at a drop of T's water and so astonished by what she's seeing that she drops her cup of tea made of T's water of course the thing about boiling T's water is you remove the impurities but a lot of londoners didn't do that they were drinking water extracted from the river uh and hardly surprising a whole series of color out outbreaks occurred during the 19th century um until the connection was made between water and chera so we've got the other point to make as well of course is that the Temps at this period in the in the beginning of the 19th century was just beginning a very long sharp slow well long decline in water quality such that the river was biologically Dead uh between well way Upstream all the way down virtually to sort of Dartford um there were no fish swimming the last salmon was recorded as being caught in the Temps at Putney in the 1830s but after that up until the 1950s the end of the 1950s the river was pretty much dead these days of course it's all changed as this little girl who's on an environment agency open day dipping session can readily attest she's finding lots of crustacea and fish and all sorts of things and those of those of you who are familiar with the terms will know the number of water Birds you see Now heron and corant and sorts they're there because the fish are there we now know that the TS is home to something like 125 126 different fish species including the salmon we have the salmon back in the temps now there's huge amounts of evidence for the river being just as fcked in fish during the uh period before the 19th century we have good evidence lots of archaeological evidence for the presence of fish traps all the way way along the river uh in the greater London area we've got no more something like 30 I think now fish traps recorded archaeologically this one is uh we're looking here at the Chelsea foreshore at World's End we're looking Upstream towards sort of Chelsea Chelsea Harbor in the background there the tower just chopped off and what we're looking at here is a series of middle Saxon Stakes put into the temps making a sort of V at the downstream end of which you would have a fish basket there into which fish would be funneled on the E tide we've got lots and lots of these but they all date to the Early Middle and late Saxon and medieval periods we have very little evidence curiously for the exploitation of fish in the temps Valley in the Neolithic the Bronze Age or the Iron Age most peculiar um with with one exception we have various indications that Pike will be being caught were being landed and their remains were being buried with all du ceremony in a number of rather curious positions within ritual sites at places like um whoops excuse me at places like Lowa Horton here out to the west of Heathrow and here at runny bridge this chap here this is Steve double who was the star of the angling time angling angling times in 2010 with this monster Pike which he'd taken from the temps I think this is probably somewhere in the brenford region he said that the pike was so big it nearly toppled his dingy over he couldn't wait because it bottomed out the scales at 25b he thinks the estimation is that it was a 33 pounder so it's a big fish a big prize fish well the interesting point about that is we have a fish Jawbone part of a fish jawbone from runny me Bridge here which the best estimate of weight is somewhere in the region of over 50 lb so we've got a Neolithic fish here probably twice the size of this Beast here and we have a number of other instances of big Pike being buried there's five or six of them being buried down the river but very little evidence for the exploitation of other species of fish and there's a lot of argument at the moment as to why that should be was it taboo were you simply not allowed to catch fish in the Neolithic and the bronze age bear in mind at this time this would be a period where perhaps a lot of the local communities were putting their dead into the river and if you've just put your granny in the river then you don't want to be dibbling about trying to fish out the fish into whose Spirit into whose body her spirit may have gone so there could be taboo here but this is a very Lively current subject of debate now so we've got the TS as a shaper TS as a provider TS as an artery of communication um and here I the letter box View at the top of this slide is looking Upstream Into the Heart of the pool of London here's City Hall on the Left Bank Tower of London over there and in the far distance Beyond The Belfast is London Bridge so we're looking right into the heart the maritime heart of of London as a World Trading City now if we go back in time you would expect would you not to find lots of evidence for prehistoric shipping along the river at the moment we simply don't have it this distribution map here taken from a recent paper showing the distribution of sewn plank boats and log boats you can see that the temps is largely free of such finds it's a peculiarity which we're still not really sure about why we've got a lot up here as you can see including lots of log boats these are little square symbols here and you can see them dotted about but these are probably only good for inland waterways they wouldn't make cross-channel trips I don't think they've been they've been described as the sort of personal runabouts the sort of little minis that you just nip nip down to the shops in but we've got one down here found in the irth marshes in the 19th century which doesn't survive unfortunately but it was said to have had within it neic Flint ax and a scraper what we do have is evidence at places like Dover for the presence of these big sewn plank boats and this is the DOA boat under DOA High Street this would have been well at least the length of this stage if not be not Beyond it could have held up to something like 70 people on all their gear and was powered probably by paddles like this this is a 6ft Long Oak paddle found just in the hullbridge Basin here off the off the Essex Coast now it's this sort of craft I suspect or possibly an earlier hide craft that would have brought in lots of people across the T across the channel into the temps Valley which acts then as a natural funnel Into the Heart of Southern Lan Britain uh and here we've got uh this uh diagram on the left here which I always like to think is a sort of brexiteers nightmare um this is Allison Sheridan's view of the way in which there was a multistrand human colonization of Britain at the beginning of the Neolithic period starting off with a sort of false start a little sight over here on the west of Ireland then another wave of of people moving in up the Atlantic Seaboard from the the Gulf of mang in um Britany then this big upsurge of people coming across from probably the part of Cal area and this is where our TS begins to feature but these people are bringing with them um very distinctive carinated pottery bowls and beautifully worked Arro heads and then we we've beautifully worked um hand axes Haled axes then we've got a final sort of uh Splurge of activity coming off the cotton toown Peninsula up the Western Seaboard again now all of this activity is taking place in the centuries either side of 4,000 calendar Years BC the ferus Cove stuff might even be something like 4,200 but we are lucky in London in that we've got part of this transm East assemblage coming into the temps Valley we're back to black wall this is an excavation carried out a few years ago by the temp Valley archaeological Services they located a single burial of a woman laid on her left side with her knees drawn up and her arms drawn in she's accompanied by some beautiful shirts of carinated Bowl Pottery of the sort that was being brought in here and she's been radiocarbon dated to around about 4100 years calendar BC so she bids fair to be a first generation incomer probably aboard a hide boat um which is doesn't survive but bringing with her knowledge of um seral cultivation and herding of domesticated animals such as sheep and goats coming with her or communities like her are these fabulous axes these Jade axes taken from the Western Alps this one is in the museum of London's collection it's on display in the gallery upstairs if you have a chance to look at it after afterwards it's from Mont viso in Italy at the western edge of the Alps and as it says here Sacra this stuff is thought to be a magical a magical um uh sort of rock which ownership of which conferred on you a good deal of status and we've got one of quite a number of these from the uh from Britain only three or four from the TS Valley this one comes from the TS at Mort Lake beautiful ax absolutely fantastic I haven't got time to tell you the other stories that relate to this ax because I've got to move on I have got to move on actually um right AR of communication we're now beginning to see once around about sort of 3,600 3,300 calendar BC those early communities begin to spread out onto the onto the fertile gravel Terraces such that we have massive communal monuments built out there this one is uh an embanked um Avenue which runs for something like 4 kilm under Terminal 5 at heo and which was excavated in advance of the construction of the airport in constru of the of the terminal we've also got another woman burial here this is at shepperton here she is reconstructed facial reconstruction this woman looks as though she is what has become described been starting to be described as an isotopic alien the chemical Isotopes in her teeth suggest she's not a Londoner the amount of lead in her dentine suggests that she was brought up as a child in an area of high lead content in the groundwater penines mendips darbishire Peak something like that but not London she's been she's come in in the Bronze Age we get those communal Landscapes those big Monument dominated dominated Landscapes broken up into Holdings small Holdings of Fields um so that we're perhaps now beginning to move from a commonly owned landscape into a landscape owned by different kin groups who worked side by side each of these each of these land Holdings might have been a different family group together with common land in the middle and an artist reconstruction of what that landscape might have looked like which to modernize looks sort of reassuringly familiar it looks like a a piece of modern agricultural landscape perhaps the fs a bit bigger these days um with little sort of settlements dotted amongst them and then we have a general move towards uh a sort of uh sort of gathering together of people at the end of the Iron Age and I showed this particular s this is a favorite of mine This Is Caesar's camp at herro under the Northern end of the under the Eastern end of the main Northern Runway at Heathrow um it was known on maps I mean stele on the on the top left there called it Caesar's camp but on early Maps it was called shakes spry Hills which Margaret gelling suggests could well come from something like shakas BG the robbers fought in Old English so it looks as though H Heath had a dodgy reputation way back before the 18th century Highwaymen were abroad the other thing of course about arteries is the TS is a major artery but the tributary streams which join it are arteries in their own right and we have a huge amount of evidence now for uh presence of hunter gatherer communities in the in the um The Valleys of the river col and the river Lee in particular the col is the is the picture you see at the top there Sunset over Buckingham Sher looking across the col Valley rather nice pick and down here at the Lee Valley we've got a series of excavations undertaken this particular one happens to be under uh Ford's Park Road in dagam what we've got is a hunter gatherer site a lot of Flint tools gathered around literal hotpots this is a this is a a distribution of the burnt Flint on that site and you can see literally little little hars there around which people are gathered and I I have got to move on I'd love to do more but um I haven't got time so we've got the TS as a shaper TS as a provider TS as an artery TS is a boundary as a barrier of physical and psychological presence and here we reached straight away for Caesar Who records in the um uh GIC Wars fighting his way across a defended Ford somewhere in the London region on his second expedition of BC 54 fortified the the Ford fortified by wooden Stakes driven into the riverbed by the British tribesman who had to fight his way across successfully as it as it turned out this gentleman down here this is Rufus NL buckton who's a labor Pier 6' 3 in tall attempting to cross the Temps at a Ford which he claimed was the one that Caesar used how's the parliament in the background he's about to walk across or attempt to walk across the Temps at low tide here's his Stak booat out here with the red flag he's 6' 3 in tall and he reckoned at low tide the TS is only 5' 4 in at midstream well he miscalculated he had to swim and was hauled out on the far side and he said as he climbed out panting well it must have been raining pretty freely in the cotwolds the week before he'd reckoned without River changes without dredging without the deepening of the of the central Channel but interesting this cesarian the search for Caesar's um Ford has engaged endless antiquarian debate and this slide sort of summarized some of those suggested positions for Caesar's Ford here at Westminster we've got claims made for Chelsea for Putney Fulham for Brentford of course where that Obelisk was uh for Kingston and the the cway stakes down at Walton Bridges so we've got een different examples to play with een different claims the short answer is we don't know we have no idea it was somewhere in the London region somewhere along this stretch of the temps now there are a couple of sites three sites I want to just focus on firstly this one here at Putney Fulham because this is an interesting one there's a lot of very very interesting stuff coming out of the river there it's the site of a medieval uh Ferry an important Medieval Fair here but it's also the scene of a number of discoveries made in the river TMS like the fabulous circular shield with the two River Birds one there the head another one there with the head and the beak running around into s webbed feet various Weaponry this this dagger was actually curled into an S shape when it was first found it been bent quite deliberately into an S shape glass bead um and two human skulls radiocarbon dated to between about sort of 300 and 200 calendar Years BC broadly the date for this uh uh this spear this Shield boss here so we've got an interesting lot of activity going along on that on that River Crossing now is this one of these so-called mythical opida these defended enclosures the defended sites which Caesar mentions in in various parts of his GIC Wars but which he doesn't mention with regard to the TS Valley there are none no no major settlements but there must have been there must have been something going on at Putney Fulham in the latter part of the Iron Age there certainly was something going on at woit under the Arsenal because Brian philp and the Oxford archaeological unit have done excavations there which have demonstrated a massive massive ditch here an inner ditch this is Hill for sized and another outer ditch which seemed to sort of enclose a promet of of gravel jutting out into the jutting out into the river and as Brian philp posed the question in his report was woit the London of the middle Iron Age what we can suggest though is that this enclosure this defended enclosure must have fallen out of use by around about the 80s BC so too early for Caesar then of course we've got London and everybody wants to find an Iron Age opom under londinium and centuries of specul and Decades of archaological excavation have singularly failed to provide an Iron Age precursor for London we've got fines whoops sorry scattered fines but nothing of of all dates but nothing that would lead us to suppose we've got an IR age opom now I really have got to move on because this is my last section I've got about five or six minutes I think is that okay okay so we've got T of shaper TS as provider as artery as boundary we've also most importantly got TS as a sacred stream which acted for various communities in various ways at various different times water of course is an absolutely fundamental life-giving Force every Community needs access to water every Community or many communities venerate water and of course water is a very reflective medium without mirrors you're looking down into a stream you're going to see your reflection which which may have particular sort of resonance too now these were mentioned in the in the introduction and I couldn't resist putting them up myself here are a couple of fabulous objects out of the river temps the battery Shield there uh found during the construction of Chelsea bridge between 1854 1858 and the H helmet from waterl bridge in the probably the 1860s fabulous artifacts we have records going back though much before the 19th century this uh view of flank Frank pledge held at eworth in 1467 John Rouge of eworth of four said Shoemaker found one torque of gold within that domain weighing 50 Shillings Sterling which is called Treasure Trove John Rouge obviously was out on the foreshore found this gold had to declare it at the court because he had to bring it to the abess of Canan who acted for the crown on matters of Treasure Trove in the eworth area no doubt there's no doubt about it the ABS of s confiscated it had it melted down which was why we know it weighs 50 Shillings or the equivalent of it interestingly another piece of gold turned up under San Park during recent excavations that I've referred to a little bit earlier this is a a ribbon torque a ribbon bracelet rather with sort of buff terminals or half of it anyway it's been snapped off but dates to the latter part of the Bronze Age about a thousand years or so BC so we've got a long history of this stuff and we've got tons of it and the temps dominates distribution maps of prehistoric artifacts here I'm almost at random I've chosen a distribution map of antl M heads antl matics you can see the hall from the temps compared to anywhere else absolutely astonishing and it's the same for virtually any artifact class you care to mention if you go upstairs into London before London gallery that River wall gives you a flavor of the quantities of material which have been recovered bu chaps like this dredger Cruise either working with a spoon and bag like these chaps here at reading bridge in the 20s in the 30s or by steam dredger like this one here off the temps off the tower in the 18 30s onwards they had lovely names these steam dredges Goliath Hercules Etc and they could shift something like 20,000 tons of Riverbed a week amongst which were lots and lots of fins which have made their way into the river picked up by these chaps who shifted the dredged gravel by by sheer weight by sheer muscle power into the holds of sea Colliers who needed to stiffen up to go up back up the East Coast that's a whole lecture in itself which I haven't got any time to go into these days of course we have um mudlock who bring fins in as part of the portal antiqui scheme here report them a couple of fabulous objects this one beautiful banded Rock uh nearth thic perforated ma head um probably dating to the middle part of the start of the third millennium BC something like that but of a banded Rock which we don't recognize is this Norwegian is it Northern Scottish we don't know other finds brought in here's Andy Johansson one of the mudlock with a rather nice dagger in a wooden sheath which we've had radiocarbon dated between 800 and 650 calendar Years BC here it is an x-ray here's another da dagger Scabbard that was brought in just a few months ago from Putney Bridge the finder thought it was a um a Victorian bayonet Scabbard and had given it a thorough scrub with a Brill pad before bringing it in but there's no doubting what he's got here it's a lat 10 one dagger Scabbard dating to probably the fourth or third Century BC a number from West London and this is this is one of the one of the nice ones how do we explain all this stuff going into the river well here are some of the some of the various suggestions and I haven't got time to unpack any of those what I do want to do though is just focus on that bottom one plating Elemental forces now here's where we go back to the river the flooding rivermist Richard coats from Sussex university has taken the place named londinium which is the the name by which the Romans called their settlement and has unpicked it and suggested that originally londinium derived from an invented word called plona and the asterisk is an eological uh flag to show that that's an invented word he can't prove that that was what it started life as but that's his suggestion and he's suggesting that plona can be translated as something like flooding river boat River or river that is difficult to cross so what he's suggesting is that the ancient TS may have had two names tamea the flowing one plona the flooding one so a Time temps and a non-title temps and yes a picture of what modern Central London might look like without the Greenwich flood barrier now of course Bronze Age communities had no engineering Solutions oh quickly yes just to you know the the medieval references brim with with references to flooding so this is not a new phenomenon the winter of 2014 is not an isol ated occurrence it's happened throughout history I I'll I'll skip quickly on the biggest most uh devastating flood over the last century or so is in 1953 and this is canvi Island Oil City hence that Oil City there and the point there is oil city is 100% pure below sea level we got a very low Ling sight Rising River level that's what happens 53 people killed now and those storm ties those Storm surges those flood ranges of up to five six seven meters powered things like tidal Mills and here's a a medieval 12th century tidal Mill being excavated at Greenwich just in here and a rather nice medieval view of one of these tidle Mills at work now I say Bronze Age communities were in the teeth of the storm here because what we've got there's good archaeological EVS we've mentioned submerged forests those drowned forests in the Bronze Age and the Neolithic we've got other archaeological evidence in the forms of uh drowned Bronze Age field systems and you can see the crisscross AR marks from Bronze Age plows on on the sand Islands here under North subach what you can't see is the 2 m or so of flood silt over the top of it on the right of the screen we've got a Bronze Age trackway Brushwood trackway uh dating to the middle part of the second millennium BC but here you can see the flood silts over the top of it so what we've got here are bits of landscape ancient landscape leoness surfaces if you like overtaken by the rising temps no engineering Solutions one suggestion is were these objects that many of which are beautiful objects were they going into the TS as an attempt on the part of Bronze Age communities to Plate an elemental Force now if you look at the distribution of these objects they're all in those West London stretches all here this is this is a map of metal work dating from 1300 BC 1 1200 1100 and th000 or little bit later if you match those distributions of metal work against indicative flood risk areas you'll see it's the same stretches at the Upstream end that are affected by the Bronze Age uh flood um episodes and into into the whose streams these various objects have gone now I haven't got time to go further I could say that clearly this is a phenomenon from the southern part of the North Sea Basin Continental Rivers Ms Shelt s will all have potentially similar episodes going on and we know that there's lots of dredged material from those Rivers [Music] too TS is still being used as a receptacle for uh religious offerings like these devali lamps like these little Hindu gods and goddesses we know that you can now hire a boat from twicken and boat yard to take you out with the ashes of your loved one to place in the river because the TS is part of the Ganges in terms of a Hindu world viw and one final Point uh the wobbly bridge and many of you will have walked across that countless times many of you will probably have noticed little L loocks little padlocks and I walked across this morning there were three on there it's a bit stingy because the corporation take them all off and the reason they take them all off of course is because here's the uh here's the pesar across the s in Paris which collapsed under the weight of the padlocks I always like to think actually this is this is a very British take on lamur compared to France Anyway by the bye my last slide that's what I've done this afternoon I've given you an insight into some of those different aspects apologies to the shade of Kipling thank you very [Applause] much e

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 51,173

Keywords: gresham college, gresham, lecture, free lecture, gresham lecture, public lecture, free public lecture, free education, education, museum of london, archaeology, london, Early River Thames, River Thames, The Iron Age, Thames Valley, population movement, urban growth, agricultural, industrial activity, romans, mola, Jon Cotton

Id: ApnRImzjzFw

Length: 54min 23sec (3263 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2016