As he went out for a row one morning on the River Thames in London, graphic designer Simon Hunt came across a rather unexpected find.
More info : bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-60348707
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Martin Bushell spotted the 5,600-year-old skull fragment digging in the muddy banks of the Thames
A human skull from the Neolithic era has been put on display at the Museum of London.
But the incredibly rare specimen wasn’t found in some elaborate archaeological dig. The skull was unearthed by a sharp-eyed mudlarker strolling the banks of the River Thames.
“When I first saw it, I thought it was a pot that might have been upside down — like a ceramic pot,” Martin Bushell told As It Happens host Carol Off. “It looked more like a crab shell.”
Mudlarkers are amateur archeologists who scour the banks of the Thames at low tide for treasure and historic artifacts. The tradition dates back to the Victorian era.
You never know – there may even be summat prehistoric!
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Ever wonder what lies beneath your feet? On 16 July the Museum of London opened Archaeology in Action. The exhibition offers visitors a flavour of the varied day to day work of archaeologists in London, today and in the past. From the ground to the display case, Archaeology in Action gives visitors an insight into what happens to objects unearthed by Museum of London Archaeology.
Countless exciting archaeological discoveries have been made, and continue to be made each day in London. These have greatly contributed to our ever evolving understanding of the capital. Archaeology in Action presents some of these valuable finds. Sites that feature include the Roman High Street unearthed at number 1 Poultry and the Saxon town of Lundenwic uncovered at Covent Garden. There is also a changing display of new finds from London sites, starting with Shakespearean playhouses, including The Rose and The Theatre.
The exhibition space will host a varied programme of events, including a selection to celebrate the Festival of British Archaeology, 17 July – 1 August 2010. Visitors can expect to handle ancient artefacts, meet an osteologist or identify finds from the Thames foreshore.
Taryn Nixon, Managing Director of Museum of London Archaeology, says: “The exciting thing about the Museum of London is that it runs one of Europe’s largest archaeology teams, and has literally been unearthing the secrets of London’s past for decades. This exhibition gives us a chance not only to share our discoveries as soon as they are made but also to show what really goes on behind the scenes in archaeology.”
Jon Cotton, Senior Curator of Prehistory, says: “Archaeology is one of the Museum of London’s key calling cards and excavated finds inform every gallery display. Archaeology in Action celebrates this commitment to London’s buried past and provides a space in which some of the latest finds will be displayed.”
The Museum of London Archaeology is a long-standing and highly regarded in-house archaeological team and has unearthed a wealth of archaeological treasures. These finds are cared for in the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre – Europe’s largest archaeological archive.
“Archaeologists have unexpectedly uncovered London’s oldest timber structure, which predates Stonehenge by about 500 years.”
More here – livescience.com/history/090813-london-oldest-timber.html
A 4,000-year-old flint axe, four prehistoric skeletons and a 19th century boat have been unearthed at the Olympic Park.
Preparations for the London 2012 Olympics have seen over 140 trenches dug on the 1.5 sq-mile site in Stratford, east London, turning it into Britain’s largest archaeological dig, according to the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA).
This exhibition at the Royal Academy explores the work and achievement of the Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries of London since its foundation in the early eighteenth century to the present day.
Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts and the Society of Antiquaries of London to celebrate the Society’s tercentenary, the exhibition showcases treasures from Britain’s oldest Learned Society concerned with the study of the past and is complemented by works from national and regional museums.
It features works of art, antiquities and manuscripts of unique historical importance, such as a processional cross of King Richard III and his defeated Yorkist army recovered from the battlefield of Bosworth (1485). Also on show will be the earliest known medieval manuscript illustrations of Stonehenge, as well as drawings and paintings of this and other historic sites and monuments by great artists such as Constable, Turner, Girtin and Blake.
A selection from the Society’s extraordinary collection of early English royal portraits from Henry VI to Mary Tudor will be displayed together in public for the first time.
Heathrow reveals historic legacy
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3072211.stm
An archaeological dig at the site of the new Terminal 5 building at Heathrow Airport has provided a unique insight into 8,000 years of human history, excavation leaders have said.
About 80,000 objects have been unearthed at the 250-acre site, including pottery and flint.
A team of 80 archaeologists have spent more than 15 months working on the site and traced how the communities and landscape around Heathrow has changed. The project was the largest single archaeological dig in the UK in terms of the area excavated and the numbers of archaeologists employed.
Evidence showed that the first permanent settlement was in the Bronze Age (2,400BC to 700BC). By the Iron Age (700BC to 43AD) a small village had appeared but that settlement died out at the end of the Roman era. Another one grew up in the 12th Century.
Experts also found evidence that field boundaries were being created from about 2,000BC, 500 years earlier than previously thought. Tony Trueman of Framework Archaeology, formed especially to carry out the dig, said this was highly significant. “It shows that people were actually claiming ownership of land for the first time. Before this land was shared by the whole of a community, but this shows us social attitudes were changing and hierarchies were emerging much earlier than we first thought.”
Before the first settlement, the team found pits where meat was cooked by hunter gatherers during the Middle Stone Age, when the landscape was covered by trees.
Heathrow Airport was built on the site of what had previously been a private airfield on Hounslow Heath in 1946. The £2.5bn Terminal 5 project is likely to be operational in 2007.
Objects from the dig are already being displayed at the Museum of London and others will be exhibited at the Heathrow Visitors’ Centre later this year.
Loughton I/A fort
Ambresbury Bank I/A fort
Wimbledon I/A fort
Grim’s Ditch
St.Ann’s Hill I/A fort
Uphall Camp I/A fort
Caesar’s Camp Keston I/A fort
Chapter one of Peter Ackroyd’s ‘London: the biography’ – which is full of information about prehistoric London, including a bit of etymology of its hills and rivers, with plenty of interesting things to chase up.
