From reindeer bones gnawed by wolves at Old Oak Common 68,000 years ago to victims of the Black Death, a vulgar Victorian chamber pot and 13,000 Crosse & Blackwell marmalade and pickle jars – the longest slice of the capital’s history ever excavated lies exposed in a new exhibition at the Museum of London.
The Crossrail tunnel, which will hold the 73-mile new Elizabeth line that is due to open in 2018, is the largest engineering project in Europe and it has given archaeologists a unique slit trench across the capital’s history. The oldest objects shaped by a Londoner are flakes chipped from a flint axe 8,000 years ago, found in north Woolwich.
“Obviously we miss things to the north and south because we can only go where the tunnel takes us, but in the sheer scale of this project, and the time period it covers, this is the biggest piece of London archaeology ever,” curator Jackie Kelly said.
Human and animal bones turned up all along the line, including bison bones, the left leg of a Roman horse found at Liverpool Street along with 17 horse shoes, the minute jawbone of a medieval mouse, and plague victims from several sites including Charterhouse Square. Cattle bones found in Moorfields had one highly polished side, because in the 12th century when the swampy area regularly froze over, they were lashed to medieval shoes and used as ice skates.
One of the most mysterious skeletons was a Roman woman whose skull was buried between her legs: the archaeologists hope the decapitation happened after her death as the cut marks on the vertebrae prove it took several blows to remove her head.
One small cesspit in Stepney Green held centuries of fragments of timber, pottery and glass, from a Tudor bowling ball to the remains of the Victorian chamber pot with a print on the bottom of a man with his hair standing up in shock, and the text: “Oh what I see I will not tell.”
Some of the smaller deeper tunnels were judged too dangerous for the archaeologists, so the workers took photographs and brought them back to the surface. Keith Hancock, one of the tunnelling team, managed to catch and preserve intact a large pot that dropped out of the roof of one of the tunnels, and was full of cremated human bones.
The exhibition and the tunnels are both guarded by St Barbara, patron saint of artillery and mining. The statuette – still holding a plastic goblet, though her sword has been lost somewhere underground waiting to puzzle a future archaeologist – was installed at the entrance to the tunnel. Roy Stephenson, head of archaeological collections at the museum, said workers liked to touch her as they headed underground at the start of a shift.
Stephenson has just succeeded in having the statuette formally accessioned to the museum’s vast collections. “She’s a very human and touching part of the history of Crossrail,” he said.
“In fact, though we have plenty of medieval images of saints, we have few if any 20th or 21st century ones, so she fully earns her place in the collection.”
- Tunnel is free at the Museum of London Docklands, until 3 September 2017
