Prescot Street Dig in London’s East End
Ancient history and the latest technology have been working impressively together at two East End sites. The first site is the Prescot Street dig in Aldgate, where archaeologists are steadily unearthing a cornucopia of artefacts from Roman London.The second is in cyberspace, the www.lparchaeology.com website, which in superb detail shows the background to and the progress of the excavations. There are features about the Prescot Street area in Roman, medieval and early modern times. There is a comprehensive glossary so you can establish the difference between your crematoria and charnel houses. And there are some marvellous pictures, video clips and Google maps putting you right at the heart of the dig. Best of all, the website is updated ‘blog’ style, so
But why is it all so important? Most of all because this is where London started. Established in the first century AD, after Britain had been invaded and absorbed by the mighty Roman empire, Londonium was from the first a place of trade, business and commerce. For nearly 2000 years it would be the main gateway into Britain and thus of enormous strategic and commercial importance. Roman historian Tacitus leaves us the first surviving reference to London, though he was a bit sniffy about the upstart place. ‘London, a place not dignified with the name of a colony, but the chief residence of merchants, and the great mart of trade and commerce.’
This great city’s burial place is a fascinating research lab for the scientists, trying to find out how the Romans lived, how they died and what of, what they ate, and how they dealt with death. The picture that emerges is far from the tidy Roman town of stone bath houses and piped hot water (though the incidence of lead poisoning in the fragmentary remains suggests they could have suffered badly from their state of the art lead water pipes). Roman London was a rough frontier town, with people descending from all over the Empire to work and trade. Even back then, London was multicultural and some bodies were cremated and some buried. There is a surprisingly low number of children and women in the grave - archaeologists speculate that the large number of young (male) soldiers and civil servants may have skewed this figure, though it’s possible that women and children were buried elsewhere. As more and more is uncovered, you realise just how much we still have to learn.
It’s not just the Romans of course. One particularly damp trench had allowed the preservation of a leather shoe ‘vamp’ (upper) from the turn of the 15th century. Shoemaking was an important trade in medieval London, with the Cordwainers Company surviving to this day in Mincing Lane, EC3. And getting away from the dig itself, from the Middle Ages we have much more documentary evidence of how the area developed. By Medieval times, the Prescot Street site was under farmed fields. By the time of the 1665 Great Plague (and Great Fire the following year) maps still show it as open land, though with buildings encroaching around the edges. In William Morgan’s 1681 map, Goodman’s Fields is still a field. Interestingly, the maps of the time also show large houses with gardens - the area was apparently moneyed at the time. Come the 1873 Ordnance Survey map, and we see warehouses, goods yards and an increase in smaller (and thus poorer) housing, apparently built to accommodate the new and growing army of workers.
It all comes back to the Romans of course. And the dig and its website is a superb way to understand the London of 2000 or more years ago. Archaeologists running the dig are keen to encourage organised visits, through adult and community groups in projects at the Prescot Street site. Schools too can get involved, and the team are producing educational resources aimed at primary pupils. The dig will also take part in National Archaeology Week in July 2008. Check out the website at www.lparchaeology.com or contact Lorna Richardson at l.richardson@lparchaeology.com.
Tags: London history, Ancient Romans