The Mystery Of Ancient London's First Bridge | Time Team | Odyssey

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] welcome to the banks of the Thames at Vauxhall in central London it's seven o'clock in the morning and in less than an hour's time a mysterious structure a series of three and a half thousand year old wooden posts will begin to emerge from the receding Waters could these Bronze Age remains be part of a building maybe they supported a Pier from which votive objects like this beautiful spearhead were offered to the Thames or just perhaps they're all that remains of London's first Bridge as usual time team have got just three days to find out but because we're dealing with tidal waters we can only get at this structure for two hours every day so can we solve this mystery with just six hours digging this is a Race Against Time like never before [Music] foreign [Music] the moon hasn't even set behind Battersea power station but the voxel foreshore is already a wash with our digging team ahead of them is a challenge unlike any other we've attempted to investigate a complex structure accessible for only two hours each day during daylight it may have been these beautiful Bronze Age spearheads that alerted us to this site but it's these rather shabby lumps of wood emerging from the Thames that's got everyone excited there's always Timbers coming up in the river what's so special about this one well that's right Tony it's the apparent Association of the Timbers with these two bronze spearheads that's the key thing that's what we're after trying to unravel this weekend now when the Timbers came up I mean they're big they're round they're very low down on the foreshore and when we've had the spearheads brought into us we weren't sure whether there was any clear association with them but the radiocarbon dates that we had back have tied them quite nicely to the date of the spearheads that's the key thing since the Thames revealed the structure in 1993 22 Timbers have been recorded carbon dating confirms that they're up to three and a half thousand years old and their configuration suggests they could be the remains of a building jetty or even a bridge our dig will be the first full investigation into this site and although it survived three and a half Millennia this may be the last chance anyone has to study it the whole reason that we can see the piles today is because the river is eroding the foreshore on top of them so once the four shot which has sealed them for three thousand years has been washed away then the river starts on the paths themselves and it's eating those away as well so they've only got a limited life history hitters like Netflix just for history fans with exclusive history documentaries covering some of the most famous people and events in history just for you our extensive catalog of documentaries covers everything from the rise of Hannibal Barker to the illustrious Treasures of King Tut so sign up today for broadcast quality documentaries uncovering the mysteries of the ancient world we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and odyssey fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Odyssey at checkout checking our investigation into this mysterious structure by looking at one Post in particular to see what it can tell us about this possible building Jetty or Bridge the top of the one we've chosen appears to be in good condition but the eroding Shoreline means it may not survive much longer if we don't remove and preserve it what's the strategy and you're gonna you're gonna hack all that top off first we want to get a slot off yeah we're keeping the top 20 centimeters I've got all the environmental rises in it right and then we want to find out whether this is a pile or a post and whether it goes down a heck of a long way or is going to stop right conveniently an offering imagine this is the turf on any other yeah yeah we've got to put it back just as it was ah but there it is that's the edge that is the timber yeah different sort of digging anything we have on this foreshore is vital and the field walking and metal detecting surveys are already well underway but lack of time isn't the only problem we face Thames has got notoriously treacherous undercurrents so we have to have a safety boat on permanent standby and then there's the ever-present risk of viles disease the potentially lethal virus carried by the rats that live along the river it seems an awful lot of hassle for a very little hole Nick that is pathetic it's got to be the smallest trench we've ever dug on Time theme what's the point of that well there are two reasons very one is we're not allowed to dig a big area because the uh this is a sensitive environment the environment agency don't want too many big holes but secondly we don't actually need to because this is a hole to get samples from so that we can take them away and work on them in the lab so it's really a test fit to to get environmental samples from it's more scientific this scientific archeology includes taking sample calls of what's below the modern foreshore surface um unit two when we digitally map these results we should be able to strip away the last three and a half thousand years to come up with a 3D picture of the Bronze Age landscape of Vauxhall silk one sand one see this in trench one the area around our Timber has now caught our attention it's got lots and lots of little powdery bits of sand and this is all clay with wood so it's just possible it looks like we've found a post hole this is important evidence as we try to work out what our structure may be if we've got posts Timbers placed in a hole and then packed with Earth then that would suggest a structure built on dry land but if their piles sharpen Timbers driven into the ground then we could be looking at a structure built over water I think to be able to pile some of that soy so you'd need some piece of tip wouldn't you I mean wouldn't it be a lot easier to actually dig a hole it would make more sense it would be much easier to dig it if you didn't advertise coming out of the sloshing around you can't dig a hole if the water table is filling it off with water all the time we obviously need more time to solve this riddle but as the minutes tick by the tide continues to drop revealing a second Timber we want to investigate we need to get the walk boards just outside your half meter stretch so that we're not turning it up investigating trench one in the time available is pushing us to the Limit but the window of opportunity for trench 2 must break all-time team records I've got about 45 minutes I think and what do you want to try and Achieve by then we want to find out whether this iron is the same as the one over there in the way that it's been set into the ground in tool marks and see how deep it is if we can get it out today is that what we're going to do no I'm going to half section today and then we can backfill the hole with clean gravel in bags whip that out tomorrow and we can carry on down are you confident I don't know how deep it is I honestly don't know while a bemused Barney Ponders just watched physically possible with only 30 minutes digging time these the internet room is an oasis of calm here the less physical Arts of archeology are beginning to play their part in solving the mystery of the Vauxhall structure including Henry's 3D map of the present four shows all over the place so what we have is the higher ground here at the top of the foreshore running down well into the river at this Edge and in the red you can see the corners of the trenches we're Excavating just to add some context the black dots are showing the positions of fines made during the field walking all this morning yeah this morning right when the sooner you can get the position of those fixed into the base map the better actually because I'm trying to establish what might happen to this piece of ground over a long period of time okay and what things might have influenced that piece of ground where the Timbers are coming out Phil the tides turned turn yeah oh my God we haven't really got as far as we've hoped have we well I think we're doing great I mean this one is probably as as much as we would have hoped this looked very good but what can you get from this look we know now that it is definitely a post he's not it's not been piled in look we've got this beautiful cut of the actual poster so somebody's actually dug a hole and put one of the toe six that was one of our main objectives to find that out we'll crack that normally on day one we're only getting started at this time but here it's just the opposite well this is it believe it or not this is the end of the first part of our three-day dig the fastest one we've ever done on time team we've now got just 10 minutes to get off site and record before we all get our feet wet the end of our first day's digging leaves us with a tantalizing glimpse of the Bronze Age foreshore just before the Thames flooded trench 2 we found some tool marks that suggest we're looking at a Timber piled into water yet trench one seems to contain a post sunk on dry land so could the Bronze Age River's Edge be somewhere between these two Timbers while we have a well-deserved early lunch the Thames reclaims our site huddling around two small trenches all morning the rest of day one's tasks are much less claustrophobic starting with Stuart who thinks that our potential Bridge may not have spanned the whole river but crossed to an island what other evidence if there are attempts for of islands exist in the Bronze Age well we know there were Islands here for example the that building over there the houses of Parliament that actually was on that island a lot of people wish it still was but that island is thorny Island which was formed by the river thiburn which came in and demarked the sides of that particular Island right we're wondering if the river which is very close to our site the ephra whether that had a number of different channels which would have formed a series of islands there as well and if we can Define the island that could be an important trading position an important administrative position an important stronghold and it could be a jumping off point instead of building a bridge right the way across the Thames you could build a bridge from the land to an island to another Island in an island to hop all the way over so it's actually quite important for us to try and work out where the courses of these Rivers actually are see how they relate exactly to the to the fight a steward continues on his jaunt down the Thames I've returned to our now flooded site to take a closer look at spearheads that sparked this investigation I don't understand why these are such good dating evidence for those posts if you look at the force of that water surely they could have come from anywhere up River well that's true I suppose in a way Tony but the thing is I think if we talked as we did to the original finder the point he made was that the big spearhead had been jammed Point down quite hard into the foreshore quite deep the other spearhead had been put at a slighter angle Francis what do you think was going on here the fact that they're a pair is interesting isn't it yeah a big one little one you know kids and hers who knows but they were put in the ground on purpose as an offering and we're talking about the same sort of activity that you haven't flagged fan that you run where you seem to be having things thrown into the waters as offerings yes I'm sure they were yes I'm convinced that's what happened and that's incidentally why I think the spear shaft was broken out right um you know it's been deliberately removed they've been defeated right they've been they've been killed so you'd expect this structure we're getting down here to be some sort of platform rather than a functional Bridge or something well I don't think in the past anything was ever simple a bridge you know I think it was it was a mixture of of of a bridge and so Westminster Abbey there are different elements so it was the crossing that mattered meanwhile Phil's moved up River to the Wetland Center at Barnes this Sanctuary run by the wildfowl and wetlands trust is a remarkably apt location to test out how our Bronze Age Timbers may have been secured into the Vauxhall foreshore Damon you've got a much nicer spot than we are down in volume much more Bronze Age absolutely gorgeous out there it really is I mean this this is the way I sort of see Central London in the Bronze Age and I sort of Reed beds and all right but what on Earth is it is a rough sketch that might give you an idea what we got here is you know we've got this issue of we're not sure whether the Timbers in the river are piles driven in or posted in the hole yet but we think that there there would be some piles further out in the river because of the water so what we're looking is a Bronze Age Pearl driver exactly that with the Bronze Age repertoire of techniques that we know about from the boat finds and so on we we put this together and we're trying to make a simple pile driving rig using the kinds of materials so basically we got a big lump of wood yeah which is that yeah a big lump of boat and it's got a beautifully constructed hole in here uh yeah well they didn't have um drills in the bronzos they had to use tools like this like this little gouge here a rounded chisel right and then here you've got this is the actual frame two yeah two legs of the tripod this is the third leg which we're going to put here when we rear the thing up here we've made a very primitive kind of block without a pulley without a wheel in it it's just got a rounded hole we hope that the Rope pulling the big Ram weight absolutely Drive the timber that is a to me that's a very sophisticated invention do we know anything we don't know we don't know exactly we know we found lots of bronzo's Timbers with slots in like this right we know they used rope to tie things together we know they drove piles as Phil gets to grips with his Bronze Age tackle and Stewart delves into the topographical history of London there's very little the rest of us can do but wait for the Thames to once again reveal our sight it's the end of day one it's phenomenal how much the tides resistance were down on the force yeah it must be at least 20 feet above our heads now what have we learned from today quite a lot I'm pretty pleased Phil found the post pit around that Timber which therefore proves it's a post so tomorrow we've got to empty that post hole out look at the fill see if there's any Bronze Age or any artifacts in there hopefully Bronze Age and also we want to look into the field to see if there's any environmental evidence in there to help us tell whether that post hole was cut on the dry land or perhaps in the intertidal zone on the foreshore on the what was the Bronze Age for sure yeah I mean that's what interests me or we've taken lots of samples from out of those holes now science people are now looking at those we should learn an enormous amount about environmental changes and in particular we're trying a technique we've never used before which is diatom analysis what's that well it's it's I'll show you on the microscope tomorrow it's something to look forward to so join us after the break tomorrow we're going to lift one of those posts hopefully and who knows what we might find underneath beginning of day two of our digging Central London where we're investigating some Bronze Age remains under Vauxhall Bridge there well we should be but it's quarter to nine and as you can see our site's still covered with water and our diggers can't get across Gus you promised us my half last date we'd be digging what's gone wrong what's gone wrong is that predicting the tidal movements is not an exact science we've had a lot of rain last night and that seems to be delaying the the the tide going out I'm very sorry about that so I could have got up later in fact you could have had a double breakfast does that mean we'll have a shorter window in which to dig or that we'll just start later I think it means we start later and stay on the foreshore later and are we going to try and get one of these posts out today we are going to try to do some paste excavation today oh that's uh an archeologist joke I think the Tide's going down it is yesterday's dig was so intense that this morning's extra weight for the tide has put everyone on edge but finally the Moment of Truth arrives have our partly excavated posts survive the night what sort of state is it in then Barney oh it's excellent yeah it hasn't suffered any no not at all yeah and it's got the added benefit of a nice clean wash overnight yes not only is the timber in good Nick but it now looks like the Thames is going to compensate us for our late start great news the environment agency has just said that it's going to be a low tide today 15 centimeters lower than normal brilliant that's unusual but how much time does that give us and it it could give us 15 minutes more 15 minutes I'm just gonna be like half a day oh look Tony be grateful for a small Mercy look we got two hours an extra 15 minutes was that another eight uh the downside is that they reckon it's going to be a higher tie tomorrow ah so that is something you lose some it doesn't mean that today is the day we've got to go for it yeah although we'll continue to survey and take core samples from around the site most of today's work on the foreshore will concentrate on removing the Timber from trench one while we prepare for our excavation Stuart and kickass sing from Graphics are up on Vauxhall Bridge working on the graphic reconstruction of how our site would have looked three and a half thousand years ago we've got this 1681 map that shows Two Rivers actually coming into the Thames here which might indicate our site was on an island right the Northern River here is see where the chap is on the ladder yeah that's where that came in okay and the other one is just the right of the block of flats see where the keysight curves round now what I'd like to do is get a graphic which allows us to to patch that together and get an impression of the the area at the time the work to remove the timber in trench one has now begun in earnest to know whether we're dealing with a post or a pile here as it doesn't determine what our structure is yesterday we were convinced we were looking at a post but now we're not so sure you can actually see some very nice toolbox so I either that's the beginning of a point or it's simply where they've trim uh the bottom but I think it may actually be the beginning of a point um you can see these tiny little fluted convolutions there they come up a few centimeters above the water just there you see that something is beginning to happen we may be coming close to an end brilliant and Damien's also found evidence that the finishing touches to our structure may have been carried out in situation like this there's no chip possibly from working Timbers like that for the bridge but if you've got if you like construction debris and that may be giving you a surface from which the work was going on roughly although obviously it's going to be trampled around yeah uh there's a biggest piece of Oak there that black blue black stuff looks like Oak Timber very clearly these faint lines you see they're half a millimeter wide those are the medullary rays and they're very distinctive to Oak what are they they're if my face is a log for a minute yeah there's the pith in the middle these are the the their cells which form lines radiating out from the pit that's and uh um they're very distinctive in Oak and so it's a very easy uh species or pair of species to recognize we've got two native Oaks Elsewhere on the side our coring results are helping us to build up a picture for the Bronze Age for sure but this unit here is it's an organic mud right it's a semi-terrestrial surface people could have walked on it or built from it we've lost a bit it's eroded here yeah but we've got plant remains in here yeah you can see the bits of bits of vegetation in there I think this is um part of older trees right which have been growing on this surface yeah and they've preserved nicely so this is what I think is the service roughly contemporary with the structure being built right so a mid-bron's age date we have lost a little bit yeah but I think it's from around this Horizon so what would that have looked like at the time well what we have to envisage really is if you don't have any of this gravel here but instead you've got vegetation so you've got some low-lying shrubby plots but you've also got these older bushes right growing as well so you've got a vegetative for sure right and it's gradually sloping down from what we've seen in all these cools so much nicer than this we want to know as accurately as possible what 1500 BC voxel looked like which means we need to know the sort of plants and trees that grew here so we've sent a small team 20 miles down the Thames to erith in Kent to survey the fantastically preserved remains of a Bronze Age Forest but we're going to basically concentrate in this area because we know it's going to be Bronze Age it's going to be contemporary with the Vauxhall structure we don't want to go anywhere down there because the way the force was eroding at the moment means that that's all actually needed it wouldn't download right okay so we're going to concentrate up here okay um what I think we'll do is we'll just number the trees one two three four as we go along um I'll take the diameters of the trunks or stumps and radio that through so you need to put that straight on okay okay by measuring surveying and taking samples from the stumps and roots on this site we can build up a very good representation of how Woodland would have looked along the Bronze Age Thames Woodland that would have provided the raw material for our structure there we go the ground surface has been eroded away from these buttresses so the ground surface would have been around here it looks very much like uh like an oak tree and it's not a huge one either so I guess it's uh it's very much uh the size of the ones which were being used at voxel for the construction there okay has anyone got any idea how long we've got what the lady from the environment agency says there's not going to be very much slack toad so once it turns it'll come in back on site with barely an hour to go and this Race Against Time means we have to concentrate all our efforts on the attempt to lift the post in trench one which means unfortunately trench two right on the edge of the river has been officially closed down I think it is actually Tony I mean that's definitely one yeah it is I mean we wouldn't get rid of some of this play around it it you know it's really sticking to it we want to keep it protected on this side Phil why don't you want to dig all the way around because then the whole thing will just come out and we'll be left yeah we're ready to come out yeah but we want to come out in a controlled fashion we take the stuff away on all sides it's just going to fall so you're going to dig down dig down one side free it up then attach something that will brace it yeah then dig down the other side through it up same again and then lift it out in 35 minutes that's the theory keep digging out another um Damien have a look down here some of them are starting to think that there's evidence that it's narrowing to a point what do you think yeah I mean I think that's plausible we had a false alarm earlier where we saw some tool marks higher up actually where they were just removing a bulge and hopefully this is not that yeah and it is actually tapering into a point it certainly does start to look like that now if this pile is like some of the others we've seen from further up the river smaller ones then I would imagine you've got a good half of meter to go yet at least another half meter Phil we had such high hopes this morning to get this out but Time and Tide wait for no man not even the mighty forces of time team Phil if that's moving it won't come out well I mean the trouble of it is I mean it it's literally flexion at the minute Mick yeah and and I mean with this this clay and the amount of water it's just just sucking around it so even if you tried to pull it out it would still we're we're afraid that if we Flex it too much it'll snap in half so it doesn't look like today does it so close and yet so far to dig down almost just a meter and a half in such difficult conditions and still not get the timber out has been a major disappointment how are we going to look after it for the next 24 hours what we're going to do once it's been cleaned photographs have been taken some plastic wrapping is going to be put around it to protect it from Tool marks then we're going to put buckets at the bottom and the gravel bags on top of that that should protect it quite nicely and obviously make it easy to get out tomorrow we now have only one digging window left the clock's also ticking for our lab-based archeology but we're starting to get promising results first up are the coring samples we took from the Bronze Age level of the foreshore and specifically the mysterious diatoms that Mick promised me yesterday diatoms what are they um they're microscopic algae that are of interest to people who are interested in sediments because they have a silica skeleton which can be preserved that's that feathery looking thing yes it is that's the edge of the datum and in the middle you'll see the ornamentation of the center this is a diatom that you find in estuaries between the the Sea and the top of the tidal head of the river so how significant is it that we're on our near the tidal head very significant this is actually new news it was only just a few years ago that it was suggested the tidal head was as far Upstream as Westminster in the Bronze Age well we're a few hundred yards Upstream from there and now we've moved that Upstream from that so this is a first for time team we've actually we put the tidal head further upstream and what does it imply about our structure well this is important the tidal head is that point at which the river runs backwards halfway through the day and then forwards again so it's a very magic place so it's important for the ritual argument but it's also important for the economic argument because that's the point at which vessels can be swept Upstream on an incoming tide can offload their cargos and then be swept Downstream on the outgoing tide so this evidence doesn't tell us what the thing is but it tells us why it is where it is a Sprint in summary yes no Avenue of Investigation seems to be too too small or too big for our Recreation of what was going on at Bronze Age voxel Stewart's taken Mick to the London Eye for a 450 feet and three and a half thousand year overview of the site I've been looking through historical maps and although I might not think maps have a great deal to do with the Bronze Age you actually have because one of the earliest Maps is 1680 yeah and that's long before any of this developed uh when the landscape was actually still visible to the cartographers of that day yeah and what it shows is there are two fairly major river channels coming in towards the site that we're working on and these rivers that are lost now yeah another of London's lost Rivers as as the the buildings were built up particularly during the Victorian period and big expansion in Railways and Industrial sites and so on these River these River channels were still fast flowing and they had to Culvert them under the buildings and London's actually got quite a lot of rivers which flow underground now and there clearly was some so something else on the site yeah at the moment I'm following that through but it does look at the moment as if we're heading towards a scenario where our site actually sat on a an island like a triangular Island so not just a bit where the river is but going back in in sort of what is it sat between two channels and another thing which is relevant to that particular area is that from the north side there is another River channel it's a branch of the river which formed the island here at thorny right which went that way yeah so not only you've got two rivers coming in on that side of the jetty or bridge but on the opposite side you've got a river coming in as well so you've actually got a river Dynamic where you've got Bend yeah and you've got channels coming in from the opposite side well the effect that has on water flows tidal water upsetting the currents and areas all that is relevant to trying to understand that site and I've been working with uh Jane yeah to try back at Vauxhall we're starting to peel away three and a half Millennia of this Thames foreshore thanks to the coring samples that provided the diatoms what we've done now is the data that I've collected and logged on the shore we've dumped into the computer and we've now got a plot of the topography below the surface that we actually walk over this has shown some quite surprising things although the modern foreshore is fairly straight at Vauxhall our digital map shows the Bronze Age Waterfront as an embayment with our structure starting on much more solid ground and then rapidly extending into the Thames so the river's pulling further towards the shore than we thought it would we'd assume that this structure would have been built almost on a Promontory sticking out into the river and it's actually the reverse so I'm rather surprised about this and we've had a chat with Stuart about his modeling of the various rivers and we have more of an idea why this might have happened although it's come as rather a surprise Jane and Stewart have now got only a matter of hours to refine their Theory meanwhile Phil's returned to the Wetland center with Damian to try and recreate the techniques used to make the post we've been attempting to lift just beginning is this the sort of uh job do you reckon that they would have done on the foreshore or would they have actually made the Timbers and then carted them down to the river I think they might have done some of this trimming before they got to where they were going to use it and probably cut joints and things like that down there rather than do the basic trimming because it makes the timber lighter and easier to slide and handle do you wanna have a go yeah well another thing we can try is the same kind of blade halfted in a different way as an ads oh you've got one of those yeah well we've looked at some woodwork which suggests they were using them halted like this put in a handle in this way so you've got your ax there and there's the so that's the ax with the blade parallel with the handle yeah and this is the difference yeah so Damien why do they go to all the trouble to take the bark off well I think the two probable reasons for that one is to make it easier to drive the pile to make them smoother and less friction the other is the Bark's a real home to the fungi and beetles that decay the word so make the timber last one well you're nearly there Phil I really am Damian yeah it's really starting to look like the the Timber on the four short Vauxhall now I mean you look at this this area here particularly look at that fluting there rather faint but definitely clear and that's really almost exactly what we've got there they are actually yeah exactly like that Mig yeah see that log floating away it's not one of ours is it well no I looked at it and it looks remarkably like one but I don't think it is it's got a picture or something on it I just hope I hope we were thwarted today yeah but we'll carry on tomorrow um we're gonna get there well I think my main worry is that I think to get it out in one piece which is what we want to try and do is going to be very difficult there are obviously some sort of ancient cracks in it you notice that when Kelly was working down there the whole thing was sort of was really moving yeah wobbling and I think there must be some cracks across it and so I've got my fingers crossed so tomorrow we're going to get that massive pile out of there at last aren't we yeah join us after the break aren't we 7 30 day three and London's already a blur of activity a part that is from our incident room near Battersea power station where the elements have conspired against us the rain's been tipping down we've lost all our electricity except for this one power line which we've run off the security guards Hut so we can get this computer working to allow kicker and Stuart to finish their work which could be vital Mick there's all this and Omen well we seem to be struggling a bit with the water don't we one one way or another half but we we it's all beginning to come together we've got the core in results from Jane yeah and that's produced a lot of interesting results and we're waiting for a steward to finish the mapping but both of them seem to be coming together with a really rather interested exciting theme so we need to get here early so they can get on with that before we get down on the beach how long before we can start digging well I think probably about an hour and a half so we've got time to sort that and are we going to get that flipping post out today so yeah that's what we're here for in it really the Bronze Age Timber may be the focus of our diggers work but we're utilizing just about every other form of archaeological investigation to try and work out what's going on here Phil come and have a look at this lot this was found when we were doing the shore walking yeah uh any of it Bronze Age is that her yes or her no no I'm afraid this is all a lot earlier so what sort of date we're looking at wow I mean with cores like this Mesolithic sort of maybe eight ten thousand right through to about four or something like that so several thousand years before and the rest of it we've got a bit of Flint ax there Polish Flint acts Neolithic for us farmers and settlers around here how can you be so confident that this is totally different way of working the Flint Tony I mean no Bronze Age person was capable of making regular blades like that no way how would they make load s they wouldn't make blades they were just basically taken a piece of flint and knocking flakes off and making the tools out of that it's a much much poorer quality of technology so that suggests no settlement nearby near to the structure at all if the Bronze Age people were still living reindeer they'd be using Flint yeah yeah so people lived on our site during the Stone Age but they left before the Bronze Age structure was erected that rules out the theory that it's a building leaving us with either a jetty or a bridge it now seems the key to understanding our structure is working out how the Thames interacted with the land around it three and a half thousand years ago yesterday our analysis of the coring results and microscopic diatoms suggested that the tidal head of the river reached Vauxhall during the Bronze Age and now Stewart thinks he's completed the jigsaw by recreating the paths of some of London's lost Rivers including the two arms of the river ephra that surrounded our site as you can see on here the northern Channel comes into the Thames up here just below Vauxhall bridge and this Southern Channel which is the most important one comes out and there's our site so our Timber structure is right on the edge of where this Southern channel would hit the Thames and that fits in with the sample data that Jane and Henry have put together it all starts to match the other point to make about that really is that to simplify it's got the Thames like that we've got these two channels I've been talked about coming down like that our site is here on the opposite side we have a Channel of the the tie born and all three in effect come in more or less together now the effect of that could be on the main river flows as the river comes down it hits the waters coming in from these channels and starts to Eddie starts to swirl round and the effect of that is to to make the river in fact drop sediment and sand and so on in that it's carrying which would create a gravel bank or a sand Bank in the middle of the Thames that seems to suggest to me that it could still either be a ritual structure because there's something strange happening with the river here or it could be a bridge because if you've got gravel Island and so on then you've got an easier way of perhaps getting from one sure to the island and then from that Island to another one or back to the other Shore you know it's a good crossing point in fact if we have an island in the middle it could be a bridge to the island rather necessarily a bridge right across the river so it's the island that might be important it feels like we're getting warm what do we do next I think we get cold I think we have to go out on the foreshore and get very wet and try and finish our study of this particular area yeah while Graphics sets about recreating Stewart's model of Bronze Age Vauxhall the modern day Thames has receded enough to let us back onto the foreshore and the partly excavated post that we carefully packed yesterday but it doesn't look good he's moved in the night it looks more as if it's further over to me yeah is that all right fish ish in fact it's not all right as we remove the last gravel bags from the trench we find that our worst fears have been realized appointment for our diggers who've worked harder and faster than they've ever had to before but it doesn't look like there's anything we could have done to prevent the timber snapping look there's an incredibly old crack no I mean there's no way that would that would have been lucky it would have been already broken yeah this just I think we just get it out from here I'll then sweat it down and bubble wrap it up on the ball Shore so it'll be safe there should I give you this bit as well yeah all right although this setback has cost us almost half of today's digging time we're not giving up yet as we try to remove the rest of the Timber the fresh silt on the woods still in the ground shows how big the crack was we'd never have got it out in one piece have a look at this Damian well we got fairly clear shallow Marks here um quite narrow and quite rounded as we've been seeing earlier we can see them more clearly now and there's another bit I think down here isn't there a chance to hold that up let's have a look see the blue stuff isn't paint it's an iron mineral called vivianites and it shows up the marks rather well very narrow there it's the only about oh about 30 30 millimeters wide very small tools that are using very light these little Marks here are what we call in Cuts where the tools being swung in at an angle to chip up the bark into sections to pull it off and use the tool at a steep angle then you use it at a shallow angle so you get the two kinds of marks it's quite normal to see that there's another big crack here I mean this is going to have to be really carefully supported otherwise it's going to Fisher all over the place but something I think has given that a big thumb that's the problem with all the structures along the river as the banks erode they become vulnerable to this damage from from River traffic and even people standing on them John how do you know that this is older well this is a cross-section through the stem okay well we have the portion up in the incident room the final results of the erith Bronze Age Forest are now being incorporated into our reconstruction of Vauxhall 1500 BC what we've seen at Earth is that the slightly Higher Ground on the site there you're is supporting the Dryland trees such as Oak Ash Elm and Cherry so presumably if this is a Higher Gravel area you're going to have these Dryland species growing up here and then the older fringing the rivers as you come down um down onto the River Thames along these minor Rivers will have Reeds but then there will be a narrow strip of of high Reeds along the uh along the Thames probably either side of the uh the platform the archaeological bull that's Bronze Age Vauxhall is almost complete we just hadn't had enough time to get the rest of the Timber out of trench one but the very final Mata king of this dig seems to have answered the question that's bugged us since the start of day one was this wood a post or a pile there's the the edge of the Timber that is far too shallower distance to represent a poster yeah oh yeah yeah so I reckon certainly boy here we could well be into pile driven part of our project design demands we restore the foreshore to its previous state and as it's such an environmentally sensitive area that includes replacing the timber we've removed with the one Phil and Damian made yesterday team a little bit more all right we did a good job there so what do you mean it's only a two-day work a two-hour working day at least we've got our own steak in the Thames oh how long is that Gonna Last you think but it ends 3 000 Euros but although the Thames has reclaimed one of the strangest time team digs we've done the works not over yet it was extraordinarily difficult getting even half of that Timber out which goes to show I suppose how difficult it must have been for the Bronze Age people to get it in in the first place yes that was a very substantial structure not just temporary works and we've learned that it clearly wasn't a fish trap unless they were catching whales and it certainly wasn't a dry land Building and we've come to conclusion it must be either a very long Jetty or a bridge John from your point of view was this whole exercise worth anything very much so I think Tony because it's helped put into context a little bit more of the Bronze Age landscape in the London region I mean this for us is is pretty much a unique structure we've got nothing else quite like this in in the capital but what it does as far as I'm concerned it links the river with the dry land what's happening out there in Midstream have we got a Midstream island or something what's happening behind us have we got settlement activity have we got Fields drove ways all this sort of thing what do you think what's going on here yeah I wish I had the answer to that whatever it was I think it was very very complicated um it was a Crossing Place probably yeah but we know now of about 10 or 12 of these strange Crossing Place sites in Britain from the Bronze Age and nearly all of them have some element of religion so you'll find perhaps it's a human bones and bodies and broken metal work and pots that have been smashed and that sort of thing that they're making offerings to the ancestors I think but there must have been a very strong motivation to take two beautiful objects like those spearheads break the hearts often and then offer them to the waters our dig concentrated on a claustrophobic one square meter trench but we've gathered our evidence from locations along a 20-mile stretch of the River Thames so what does all this information tell us [Music] well the oak Timbers were piles driven into the Bronze Age foreshore they may have supported a jetty for votive offerings to a newly tidal river that had dramatically changed the landscape at Vauxhall but I prefer to think the evidence suggests that they belong to the oldest known bridge on the Thames foreign Shore is a mass of concrete and stone but three and a half thousand years ago it would have been lined with reeds and our Bridge would have connected the island formed by the two arms of the river ephra to an island created by the swirling Confluence of the ephra tyburn and Thames [Music] now we build right up to the water's edge but then there were no people living here they'd all moved Inland towards a forest of Alder and Oak thank you and all of this in a place that is now London but then would have been a land of floodplains marshes and Scattered communities [Music] we need some on the other side watching the foot just put your foot on it if it slides too much we've discovered so much over the last three days of this unique time team dig but we still have one last challenge can we recreate how the Timbers of our Bronze Age structure were secured so firmly into the Vauxhall foreshore eight people who knows depending on the lake yeah watch out there's ground level and where should we say there no we you're doing this properly you probably have a series of Tails I did bring it up you might need a touch it's still a bit wonky isn't it better you think that's all right well when it's not swinging yeah one two three oh yeah but look that's almost gone down one yeah one uh one graduation yeah what does that mean in units Bronze Age inches wow one Bronze Age It's about it's about two fingers [Laughter] so a victory for Bronze Age engineering and just an idea of the Herculean task that must have faced the people who built London's first Bridge so I count the three yeah one two three [Music]

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 119,151

Keywords: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries, ancient artifacts, ancient mysteries, ancient ruins exploration, archaeological dig, bridge discovery, british exploration, cultural heritage revelation, fall of Rome, historical journey, historical knowledge sharing, historical mysteries, history unravelled series, london bridge history, london excavation, london history exploration, lost empires exploration, river exploration, thames river, thames river exploration, time period

Id: 8FAF1eW9Lz0

Length: 49min 5sec (2945 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023