Bronze Age worlds: life and landscape

TRANSCRIPT

Speakers: Holly Elson (Museum of London) – introduction Kate Sumnall (Museum of London) – Chair Tom Booth (The Francis Crick Institute) Jane Sidell (Historic England) Andrew Gouldstone (RSPB Rainham Marshes)

Holly: Hello everyone! Delightful to see you all. Welcome back to the Museum of London Docklands for our first on-site event since March. It’s felt like a very long time, so thank you all for coming and it’s a lovely pleasure to see you here.

And hello also – I’m going to wave to the cameras – to the people who are joining us from home! So we’re running a hybrid event this evening, some of you are here in the room, some of you are joining us from your various locations in the world, so nice to see you, and thank you for joining us.

So tonight’s talk is the first in a series of four talks that accompany our Havering Hoard exhibition, exploring different aspects of the Bronze Age and Bronze Age London. And we’re going to have three fantastic speakers this evening, and our Chair – one of our speakers will be joining us on this television screen. We’re going doubly hybrid, so we’ll have some speakers in the room, some speakers not in the room! So we’ll be doing a few different technical things throughout the evening - hopefully it shouldn’t be disruptive at all, but bear with us, this is a new thing that we’re trying. And also, ignore me as I come up and clean the microphone and the clicker in between each speaker – I’ll just be popping in quietly!

Usual housekeeping to just remind you of – please make sure your phones are on silent. If you do wish to tweet, our information is here, you are welcome to. And if the fire alarm sounds, it’s the real thing, it’s not a drill – you can see our fire exit, modelled by the lovely Ian at the back of the room! Just follow us and we will take you to a place of safety.

And that is all from me, so with delight I’m going to hand over to our Chair for this evening, Kate Sumnall, who is the curator of the Havering Hoard exhibition and who’s going to taking us through tonight’s discussion. Kate! Kate: Lovely, thank you very much Holly. Well, it is so nice to be out and to be in a room with people, this is enormously exciting! And we’ve got such a brilliant panel of people who are going to talk tonight, and I think we’re going to have some really interesting discussion.

So it’s all about the Havering Hoard, which is an exceptional discovery. But one of the things that is so important about it is not that it’s just a massive Bronze Age Hoard, but it’s also that is was excavated as part of an archaeological site. Many Bronze Age hoards are found by metal detectorists, so we have the information about the hoard itself, but we’re missing the wider picture often. And so in this case we’ve got the information about the hoard, the immediate context of where it was buried, and then all the site data that tells us it was buried within the ditch of an enclosure. And then the wider landscape data as well, so we know how that site sat within the wider environment.

And that is really important, because the landscape in Bronze Age was just so central to everyday life, it played a vital role. And so that’s one of the things we’re going to be looking at tonight, is the role of the landscape in everyday life, and what it can tell us.

So the landscape – it’s the natural world. The hills, the rivers, the woods. And the landscape has been shaped by us, but it’s also shaped our activity of where we’ve chosen to settle – where we’ve done certain activities. That landscape’s not been a static unchanging thing. There’s the daily changes – the sun rises, the sun sets; the twice daily tides of the river. Then there’s the bigger seasonal changes, and then you have the larger, more dramatic climatic changes. Sometimes these are natural cycles of change, but even in prehistory, that change was also being accelerated, worsened by human activity. We know that in the Bronze Age it was a time of deforestation, and also climate change, climate warming and rising sea levels.

But that landscape, there is something universal about it that calls to us. The sense of place, the sense of belonging at a spiritual level as well as a practical level. So many of us find a sense of calm being by water – whether that’s by the sea, or whether it’s by rivers. There’s also something I’ve been reading about recently about woodland bathing, where you can go and be immersed in nature – and that’s just simply a walk through woodland, and it’s had a proven effect on mental health, on depression, on stress. There is just a connection with the natural world that’s integral to us as human beings. And even for those that love storms, that like that wildness of nature, there is just something about it in the land that calls to us.

In the Bronze Age people lived so closely with the land. We think, we have theories that the landscape may have been perceived as an ancestor. That possessions were not just things to be used, that they may have been imbued with a part of the person who owned it, and that is partly behind the significance of creating the hoard. But they lived and thought in many different ways to us, but there are still similarities, there are still things of familiarity, and that’s some of the things we’re going to be exploring tonight.

I’m really pleased to welcome the first speaker of this evening, Dr Tom Booth, a senior research scientist at The Francis Crick Institute. He is a specialist in ancient DNA, and he has been studying how ancestry has changed in Britain in the Middle Bronze Age and the Late Bronze Age. Exploring how there has been a shift in the population, and what I’m really excited to delve down a bit more into, how this relates to the Bronze Age – the setting of what this means to the Havering Hoard and how we can flesh out a little bit more what we can understand about the people who created this hoard.

So I’ll hand over to Tom now, Holly will come and clean things, and so we’ll be ready! Thank you.

Tom: Thank you for that, Kate. So this is presenting some ancient DNA results from a project that’s actually run, that I’m sort of distally involved with now but was more involved with over that last few months, with the University of York and Harvard University in the US, looking at genetic change in Britain through the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age.

The results still, as you will see, they’re robust but to some extend they’re preliminary and there are still aspects of them that we’re trying to work out. But I think it’s interesting to present this here, because I think that the DNA results very much contextualise the Havering Hoard on a European-wide scale. And there are aspects of the Havering Hoard which sort of reflect what we are seeing in the DNA, so in ways you can see the Havering Hoard as a sort of embodiment of lots of different things that were happening, particularly in the Late Bronze Age.

So I’m going to have to explain a bit of technical detail to sort of get across some understanding of what we’re finding and what it means. So a few of you might know that we are living through what’s been called the archaeogenetic revolution of the last ten years. And this essentially means that rather than getting DNA from just single loci, or single parts of people’s ancestry - for instance the Y chromosome, your paternal DNA representing your paternal line if you’re a man, or your mitochondrial DNA representing your maternal line or your maternal descendants – we’re now being able to get ancient genomes, information from all the way across the genome, all 23 pairs of chromosomes as well as those other ancestrally informative markers. And what this means is we’re not just getting ancestry information from one person, or genetic ancestry information from one person, but that person is a combination of their genetic material that they’ve inherited from their ancestors. So as well as it being a single person, we can treat that person as a population of ancestors. And what that means is that with what can seem like relatively a low samples size we can make quite robust inferences about populations and population change through time.

Genetic studies of Europe during the Neolithic and Europe during the Bronze Age have identified that these are major periods of population change. So during the Neolithic when you get the introduction of farming practices across Europe, it’s accompanied to varying extents by the introduction of ancestry which originates around the Aegean and Anatolia, and you can see through time that as Neolithic things and practices occur in that area so does this ancestry. It doesn’t always total replace the ancestry that was always there, it’s very variable. The further west that you go, the more of the sort of local ancestry that remains, but you get a substantial shift. So in Britain for instance, 75% of the ancestry of Neolithic farmers in Britain can be traced back to the people who were living in Anatolia 2000 years previously.

Similarly in the Bronze Age in Northern and Central Europe we see ancestry change again associated with the development of Corded Wear cultures in Central and Eastern Europe and the Beaker cultural complex in Britain. And what you see is that this ancestry that is similar to populations who live on the Steppe around the Black Sea around 3000BC, disperses across Europe. And we can see over time, in Northern Europe and in Britain this Steppe-related ancestry becomes the predominant ancestry in Britain – well, representing around 60% of ancestry in Britain.

So you can see that change here, so what you can see is, what we’ve been looking at is the proportion of ancestry that we can relate to these early European famers, so early European farm ancestry, called EEF. And you can see that from the Neolithic, so about 4000BC, it’s at around 70—80% ancestry from these Neolithic farmers, and then from around 2500BC that’s when we get this influx of ancestry from the Steppe and we get the development of Beaker cultures in Britain. And you can see that the average amount of this European farmer ancestry from the Neolithic drops substantially to around 35% or so.

But when we model modern populations of people who live in Britain today, particularly ones whose all four grandparents are from Britain, different parts of Britain, what we see is that when you model them as essentially being composed of this Steppe ancestry in the green, this Neolithic ancestry in the blue and ancestry from the Mesolithic in the red, what we see is that populations in England they have slightly more of this ancestry that’s related to European Neolithic populations than other populations. And this is more than what we see in populations who inhabited Britain during the Chalcolithic to the Early Bronze Age. So what this suggests is that sometime between the Early Bronze Age and the present day there’s been a change in ancestry, or there’s been an alteration of the ancestral component in England.

So this Comios Project that we’re doing at York and at Harvard, we’re trying to find out when this ancestry change occurs. Basically there’s already been studies of Britain during the early Medieval, when there’s supposedly migrations from across the North Sea, and while there is evidence that there is population movement around then, this doesn’t explain this particular pattern that we see, this increase in this farmer ancestry.

So we have samples – this is a distribution of the samples we have from all over Britain dating to the Middle Bronze Age, the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. What you’ll notice is that there’s obviously many more Iron Age samples than there are Middle and Late Bronze Age, and this is because they’re doing something with their dead that leaves very little archaeological record, particularly in the Late Bronze Age, so we have actually very little skeletal material to work with in these periods. So a lot of what we’re looking at is actually just comparing the ancestry from people living in Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age and seeing if there’s a change in those two periods, because we have a robust sample set, 211 individuals from the Iron Age.

And what we see is that, in the Early Bronze Age, after people carrying that Steppe- related ancestry arrive, we see that the level of this early farmer ancestry stays quite stable up until 1500BC, so around the Middle Bronze Age. Around that time it starts to steadily increase through the Middle and the Late Bronze Age – and that’s a significant increase in this early farmer ancestry that increases through time and then stabilises in the Iron Age, so we see no subsequent change in the Iron Age. So it seems that the Middle and Late Bronze Age is the period where we are seeing this ancestry change in Britain.

So this just summarises that between these periods - and this is particularly in England and Wales that we see these changes, we don’t see it in Scotland. In England and Wales this European early farmer changes over time gradually, whilst in Scotland, in northern Britain, it stays level. So this is phenomenon that seems to particularly affect England.

So to try and understand this more, we sort of looked more deeply at some of the ancestry of the people. So this suggested essentially that there people coming into Britain that carry more early farmer ancestry, either from Western or Southern Europe, who are introducing more famer ancestry, mixing with the local population and that increases the amount of early farmer ancestry. So we’re sort of trying to figure out what the mechanism behind this is and where these people might be coming from, and what the process is which produces this shift in ancestry.

So we actually have three individuals, all from the southeast - from Margett’s Pit in Kent and Patcham in Sussex, so there’s two individuals from Margett’s Pit dating to the Middle Bronze Age, Patcham in Sussex again Middle Bronze Age, and Cliff’s End Farm which is Late Bronze Age – where they have very high levels of this early farmer ancestry. So it suggests essentially that they’re probably either first generation migrants, or basically you have groups of people moving in and establishing enclaves where they initially mainly intermarry amongst themselves, and so you end up with people who have quite different ancestry from the people that they are living next to.

But in all of these cases you have people from the same site that have the ancestry that is totally continuous with the Early Bronze Age as well, so the identification of these migrants is showing very early stages of mixing, and that people buried together with quite diverse ancestries, including possible migrants.

So with the Cliff’s End Farm individual particularly, the problem is it’s very non- specific in terms of when we look at the ancestry this way, but it’s interesting in that the Cliff’s End Farm individual has been subject to stable isotope analysis – so some of you might be aware that this is where we look at the stable isotopes in the teeth to figure out what kind of geology a person grew up on, rather than the landscape in which they died.

So with the Cliff’s End Farm individual – the others haven’t been subject to stable isotope analysis – but for the Cliff’s End Farm individual, the stable isotope analysis identified them as a migrant as well and suggested an origin either in Scandinavia or the Alps. When we combine that with the ancestry, it’s more likely that this individual was actually coming from somewhere around the Alps. And the frequency with which we picked up potentially first generation migrants in the Middle and the Late Bronze Age here suggests that the southeast particularly was a focal point of people moving into Britain.

So this ancestry change where we basically compare the Early Bronze Age populations to the Iron Age populations, where we have lots of samples from all over the country, this actually produces a 25% shift in ancestry in southern Britain, so in England. And this 25% shift stretches all the way from Cornwall to Kent, but sort of decays as you go further north. So the further north you go, the ancestry change becomes more slight. That’s what illustrated here, so the more yellow the dots are, the more of this early farmer ancestry they have. And this is the Iron Age to show the kind of finished result, after those transitions in the Middle to Late Bronze Age. You can see that the dots get colder as you go further north, so in the midlands you’re getting kind of a halfway house between essentially Scotland and England. So there’s this climb of ancestry that’s mainly affecting England and Wales and not so much northern Britain, so Scotland.

So putting it in its European context, we’ve got similar time periods stretching from Early to Middle to Late Bronze Age and then Iron Age in Bohemia, Iberia and the Netherlands, what we see is very similar changes happening there, that you get an increase in this early European farmer ancestry in Czechia, so Bohemia, and the Netherlands, but interestingly in Iberia you get a decline in early European farmer ancestry. But the reason for this probably is that people living in Iberia at this time already have large amounts of early European farmer ancestry, so they are being influenced by movements of populations that have less of the European farmer ancestry than people in Beria, but more than people in Northern Europe.

So essentially, there’s a lot of research going on into the Middle and Late Bronze Age now, and it increasingly is being seen as a very important phase in European prehistory and British prehistory particularly. This is when you get what is referred to quite general as the Atlantic Bronze Age and Urnfield networks of cultures. And archaeological cultures are always difficult to really specify, they’re very miasmic, but generally speaking it’s people doing similar things in similar ways even if not everything they’re doing is exactly the same.

So these complexes are typified by elevated enclosures such as hill forts, diverse types of swords and axes, bronze feasting equipment, shared sources of metals - particularly the ritual deposition of metal work such as the hoards we’re talking about here – which all suggest a very intricate series of connections of trade and exchange, and perhaps the exchange of ritual knowledge. So Barry Cunliffe particularly makes a big thing about the fact that you get these very similar rituals around the deposition of metalwork, which he suggests has to infer some kind of shared system of belief that is getting developed throughout these parts of Europe.

And so what the DNA evidence is suggesting is that these networks not only involved movement of materials, movement of beliefs, but also quite significant movements of people. So the Middle and Late Bronze Age, Europe-wide and in Britain, represents quite a peak of human mobility in the Bronze Age. So there’s sort of two models in which you could explain these ancestry changes. You’ve either got this ‘churning’ model – I couldn’t really demonstrate this visually so I just put a little boy churning some butter! You’ve got the churn model where you’re essentially getting everybody moving everywhere and mixing. And so you essentially get a homogenisation of ancestry where, you know, you have the people from Iberia moving into Britain and increasing the amount of farmer ancestry there; people from Britain moving to Iberia and decreasing the early farmer ancestry there.

Or you have gene flow from a particular place, where people are moving from a particular place or series of places and moving into all these areas around the same time. Realistically speaking, it’s likely to be a mixture of both of these scenarios - there’s likely to be a lot of intricacies and complexities to it. But yes, it’s likely to be a combination of both, but we wanted to see how far we could establish which it was.

So the issue is that it’s unlikely that we’ve actually sampled the true source populations. There’s only limited samples from Europe that date to around this time, so it’s unlikely that we actually happened to have sampled the correct one. But from basically comparing our British samples and samples from the Czech Republic and Iberia to other European samples of lots of different ages, it helps sort of try and triangulate maybe whether there is an influence from a particular place.

So what’s interesting is that those that seem to be the first generation migrants in southeast England show the best fits out of anybody that we see for the ancestry change all over Europe. So this suggests that wherever those people came from, that was the place where – they came from the same place that was influencing, in terms of their ancestry, all these other places in Europe as well. So again this is indicating that although you probably get some level of churning, that you have one particular place that is having an inordinate influence. And we can see particularly in the southeast, probably migrants that have come directly from that particular place.

And when we compare this against other populations it seems to suggest that this gene flow is emanating from somewhere probably around southern France and maybe around the Alps or perhaps the western Mediterranean, or northern Iberia, around this region. There seems to be populations in those regions moving out and influencing the genetics of Northern Europe and in Iberia as well. So again, there is some churn, but there is a disproportionate influence from populations’ movements from around southern France and northern Iberia.

So this is a subject on which archaeologists and even angels may fear to tread, on linguistics – and I’m not particularly comfortable because I’m not a linguist! But the thing is, every time we talk about this someone brings up Celtic languages. And obviously it’s worth at the beginning - Celtic languages, Celtic art, Celtic people, the Celts, are not the same thing and they don’t necessarily coincide with one another. So there’s still a long-standing idea that Celtic languages develop in Britain through potentially migrations in the Iron Age, but some people suggested it could develop earlier, and could develop autochthonously in the British Isles through the Bronze Age.

And you don’t need for there to be a migration to instigate language change - language can change through lots of different ways. But the thing is when you see a potential influence of movements of people, and you know that there’s probably some language change going on around there, it’s hard to ignore the possible connection. So it’s possible that these migrations were what introduced, or had something to do with the introduction of Celtic languages into Britain.

It’s hard to argue for this really because there’s Celtic languages in Scotland and Ireland also in the Iron Age, and we don’t see the same type of ancestry change happening there. So in order for that to be true, there would have to be some really complex, convoluted way to explain why you see the change in England but not in Scotland. Possibly an alternate situation – so you have two types of Celtic, you have Brittonic and you have Goidelic. Brittonic which is in England and Wales generally speaking, and back in the day Brittany; and Goidelic which is in Ireland and Scotland. So it could be that because we see the ancestry change in England, but not so much in Scotland and Ireland that this has something to do with the introduction of Brittonic specifically into Britain, and perhaps before the people in Middle and Late Bronze Age Britain spoke more like a Goidelic language.

Also this genetic change might be totally unrelated to the development of Celtic languages in any way, because to some extent it’s an impossible thing to prove. I just have to talk about it because if I don’t talk about it someone else will mention it anyway!

In terms of the Havering Hoard, I think what’s interesting is the Havering Hoard, in terms of its diverse origins and styles and things, very much embodies what seems to be happening in Middle and Late Bronze Age Britain, where you have this peak of human mobility that has a lasting effect on the genetic ancestry in southern Britain particularly, and feeds into this idea that the Havering Hoard is representative that Britain is part of a much wider European network of exchange and potentially belief systems. And that this substantial Europe-wide movement of objects, ideas, but also people – and this has long-lasting effects on the population of Britain and potentially maybe influenced the languages that people spoke.

So I’d like to thank these people. And that’s the end, thank you! Kate: Thank you very much to Tom. I’ve learnt a lot and scribbled down a whole load of questions to ask you later!

Next up I’d like to introduce Dr Jane Sidell. She is the Inspector of Ancient Monuments for Historic England – I think that might be the coolest job title ever! She’s been involved in London’s archaeology for more than 20 years, and is specifically interested in how people have formed part of the ecology, living in and modifying the landscape with the specific area of focus around the Lower Thames Valley. So it will be really interesting to see how our site of the Havering Hoard in Wennington fits within the wider context of Bronze Age activity all along the Thames. So I’ll hand over to Jane now. Thank you.

Jane: It’s so fantastic not to be shouting into a computer! I’ve done a few talks since we all went in to hide in our houses, and this is my first time out, so I’m delighted that you’ve come to see us.

As Kate said I have worked in London for – this was quite funny, when we were chatting about it I didn’t actually admit how long – it has been quite a long time! I worked at the museum for a good decade as an environmental archaeologist and this is where I’m happiest! I’m a field archaeologist and I’ve been particularly interested in how the landscape of London has evolved, particularly since the last Ice Age. I’m actually happy with all of human – to use the term loosely – occupation of the London area.

And the changes that you see over the prehistoric period are quite staggering, how the landscape has been manipulated. It’s something that we tend to be very distant from. For 99.9% of human – again to use the term loosely – occupation it has largely been a subsistence economy. The last few decades have seen such technological advances, we are further and further away from understanding this, so it’s nice to have the opportunity to reflect on other periods of change, of landscape modification.

And so something that I’ve looked at – and I really haven’t moved out of London very much – is how people have used the Thames Valley, how they’ve manipulated the Thames Valley; but how they’ve responded to the natural changes in the Thames Valley. And this deposit, this site, this area is doing things at a very interesting time, and I want to give you the context of time. Tom has given the context of people and how they are moving around, and I’m going to say exactly the same things actually, about the importance of this site on the European stage, but I want to talk a little bit about the context in which it happened. Some of you will have read 1066 and All That, and you’ll be familiar with the concept of the memorable date. [1945] This one, quite memorable. [1666] This one! Either one of the outstanding years for the plague, or the Great Fire of London - some of you I hope will have seen the exhibition that the Museum of London did a few years ago. [1066] Another memorable date, when we all had to start learning to speak French – or not. [43] This one, where we had to start learning Latin – or not! But the one date that should be as memorable, because of the huge amounts of transformation that happened, is this one [-1500]. Every time that we get radio carbon dates from prehistoric sites, it’s always about 1500. You’ll know with radio carbon dates there’s a little bit of range, there’s a little bit of error. But the amount of dates – sometimes you can practically sniff something and think, “It’s going to be about 1500!” So much happens at this time, it’s such a dramatic shift.

It’s akin with things like the invasion of AD 43; the Battle of Hastings, the invasion of 1066. So much change happens, it’s something that we see with bodies, with ritual deposits – sorry, place deposits – and it’s something that we see with shift in land use. In the Neolithic we seem to see a very sparsely occupied landscape, but we see a landscape were veneration is very physical; where, with henges, with standing stones, with chambered tombs, with long tombs, with a variety of things, we see almost a revered landscape. When we come through at this tipping point of about 1500 BC, we see quite a change from a monumentalised landscape to a much more functional landscape - we start seeing settlements.

In London for instance, we might have one Neolithic long house, the jury’s a little bit out on that, but my goodness we have a lot of Bronze Age houses. Oh we have a lot! And it seems to be at this point that for some reason we get an explosion of settlement. This is a reconstruction of a site at Springfield Lyons just over the border into Essex. Fair small, generally circular, small enclosures, a couple of huts inside, a few other things going on inside, and there are many, many of these around the country. Now in the London and Essex area, Kent area quite a lot but they are almost ubiquitous. This is a reconstruction of the one at Mucking, again over the border into Essex. Fairly small, sitting in the middle of generally a mixed farming economy. The field systems turn up – we even found the ploughshare. This one turned up – now unfortunately the conservators had glued this together before we could radio carbon date it, but we’ve radio carbon dated one of the fence posts. This was a broken ard tip that had been shoved in a fence line. This is from Southwark, very close actually to the GLA building, and the fence post dated to about -1500.

And then pastoral economy as well: sheep, cattle, some pig we find, mainly sheep and cattle, grazed in field systems but also on the marshes. We found a series of trackways in the London area, many of which have been radio carbon dated, many of which date to about -1500. Beckon, of all places now – I don’t know if anyone knows Beckon? It lacks the romance and the beautiful mistiness of the Rainham Marshes, it’s a bit grim but my goodness, in the Bronze Age it was a real nexus! This is the trackway from the Beckon golf site. This is a platform, also from Beckon, out in the marshes. These are built in the marshes, on the marshes. They’re using the marshes we think for collecting a variety of things, and for grazing stock in the summer months. I don’t have a picture but there’s a metal surface, a round metal surface about 4 metres wide in Dagenham, heading north-south, we think for taking stock into the marshes - there are poaching marks from hooves. And if you take the radio carbon date of the peat underneath and above it and split the difference, it’s about -1500.

So all this is going on, we’re seeing a dramatic explosion in exploitation of the landscape. And this is a lovely drawing of a trackway from Beckon 3D, which is a different one. This was the first one we found, and actually it ties in with changes in the planning system when we started looking in strange places for archaeology, and my goodness we found more than we bargained for!

Now, the other thing that happens around 1500 BC, and whether it is coincidence or whether it’s not is something that we’ve still not bottomed out, but this is where we see a change in sea level rise. I looked at sea level change in the Thames are part of my research, and it’s fairly clear that at about -1500 we start to see an increase in the rate of sea level rise, and the key that happens here is the rate of rise starts to outstrip the rate of peat accumulation. Because in the Lower Thames Valley we have a very wide flood plain, most of which is filled with marsh. But as sea level begins to rise faster than the marsh rises you overtop the marsh. So we see a significant change from about -1500. In terms of mil per year, it’s very little but it’s just that tipping point that means that the marsh gets overtopped. The marsh can no longer be exploited as this goes through, but what it does mean is that the tidal head is moving further and further upstream which opens up the Thames, it opens up the Thames Valley - it means it’s navigable by boat, you can get a boat to take you further upstream. So we see a change in the use of the river, the use of the margins of the flood plain.

This is another thing that happens at almost exactly this time – this is a reconstruction of the timber structure at Vauxhall. It was found in the late 1990’s and it was identified as “London’s first bridge”. Because everything you find archaeologically has to be first, the biggest, the shortest, the youngest, the oldest, the widest, the fattest, the tallest, the greenest! It isn’t a bridge. It’s probably a causeway, a jetty, something – I did an auger survey around where it was found on the foreshore, and if anything it’s set back slightly from the river. But it was found with several spearheads. And again, the radio carbon date is about -1500.

What is also happening about this date is an increase in deposition, and this is where we come to the links with the hoard. We’ve seen use of the landscape before, we’ve seen monumentalisation of the landscape. We have seen use of the river for deposition of items, but from this point we see a shift, an order of magnitude shift in the amount of material that is going into the river.

In terms of preciousness or not, cost value or not, it’s almost impossible to say. These are ludicrously expensive – in a general term – items. If you think of the effort, the resources that go into making something like this, they are ludicrously expensive items. So in the past, when there have been suggestions that these items have been lost accidently in the River Thames – if you dropped one of these into the Thames, either you or someone you know is going to dive for it and get it back.

There have been suggestions that these were battles. Again, I think if you’re losing this amount of metal someone is going to recover them. And there are huge amounts - when I started putting this talk together I think I had 6 slides, and I thought I’m not going to get away with that, I’ll just have one! But any of you who have been into the gallery in the Museum of London, or the British Museum – or if any of you have been lucky enough to be in the stores at the British Museum, you’ll know how many there are of these, it is an astonishing number.

And so this is starting to happen – deposition on an unparalleled level is starting to happen at about this time. There are a variety of possibly more plausible reasons to do with power, to do with ownership, to do with wealth, and the lovely conspicuous consumption. “I’m so wealthy, I can put one of these in the river as an offering, to show that I can!” I’m afraid Donald Trump has just come into my head! I’m really sorry about that, but you see where I’m going with this! It’s that kind of in-your-face, outrageous braggadocio – possibly that might be one sort of explanation. But whatever it is, it’s going on and it’s something that’s happening at this date and that we see more of.

Now some of the items might well be loss from a battle. This is something else that we see – we might have some samples you might be interested in. This is a picture that was published a few years ago, and this really goes back to Richard Bradley who is one of the heroes of British prehistory. He has researched and written and written and thought, and thought, and written and published for many decades now, and he produced a paper some time ago actually, looking at skulls from the River Thames. And half of the skulls that he dated were from the Bronze Age and most of them were young males, and this is where part of the “there were lots of battles” idea came from.

Skulls do turn up – I was about to say periodically, but I think we’ve had 3 in the last month from the Thames! But what happened more recently is I was asked to help supervise a PhD student from the Natural History Museum, because they’re sitting on 200 skulls that I did not know about! And the student is doing some of the isotopes and also she has obtained 36 new radio carbon dates, and so she’s looking at testing some of these ideas that a high proportion of the skulls in the Thames date to the Bronze Age, and that they’re all young males. And I don’t know if I was more horrified or unsurprised, but about half of her radio carbon dates date to about this period in the Bronze Age. It is a clear pattern, there is something going on. She’s writing up at the moment, and so when she has the full results of the isotopes, the gender, the age at death, the trauma – and there’s a lot of trauma – then we will be further forward.

But the river is certainly front and centre of what’s going on with an increase in settlement just above the flood plain. So perhaps in a simplistic way, the way that the landscape has been revered more in the Neolithic is shifting into the river: the river is far more part of the ritualised aspect of life.

And this is where we are with the hoard. This is the context, so we’re seeing a shift to deposition of prestige items into the river, we seem to be seeing a shift of deposition of bodies into the river. As Tom was saying, there’s not a lot of bodies to be found on dry land at this date at all, we are fishing them out of the river. And if you think of how few finds we are likely to have from the river, compared to what went into the river, clearly it’s quite extensively used.

So the hoard – the site at Havering is very interesting. It’s in a commanding position above the river - it’s not in the marsh proper, it’s sat above it. But the type of material is similar but different. The thing that we’re finding in the river are swords, spearheads, the shields – actually there’s very few shields. In the hoard itself we’re finding a different group of materials, so we’re finding the axes, we’re finding spearheads, but we’re finding metal working waste. Part of the issue is, when someone finds something from the river, if for instance they are a mudlarker now looking on the foreshore they’re not necessarily going to come back with a bit of metal working waste. And the same will be true about the antiquarian collections. People collecting from dredging are going to bring back the swords, the spearheads and they’re not going to bring back the waste, so this is one of the difficulties that we have in comparing the finds from the river to the finds from the hoard site. Now another thing to think about contextualising this is the Bronze Age goes on for a bit. I’ve talked about -1500 as a key date when things change dramatically, but the hoard – there is a greater difference in time from the hoard back to -1500 than there is between the two Elizabeths. Now this is worth thinking about – chronology doesn’t work in a completely linear way, when you’re looking at technology, when you’re looking at shifts like this. I’ve put up a very noddy image of the idea of the shift from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, this is not necessarily directly applicable but it is worth thinking about.

So we see an absolute shift at around -1500 of what is happening in this area and how is it happening. The hoard is about 600 years later, so that is a significant amount of time that has passed, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that cultural practices have shifted. What it might though is that people have changed, and this is where the work with the DNA, with the mapping across Europe has changed.

I think some similar maps are going to be appearing! The reason that I want to show this one is not so much about whether we’re Urnfield or whether we’re Atlantic, but where we are positioned. Because where the Thames Valley is is really crucial, and I’ve seen some maps but unfortunately I couldn’t find one, that show Europe upside down. They show the Thames Valley really as a funnel from Scandinavia, and part of London’s position in the Middle Bronze Age is a factor of geography. It’s a factor of two things, it’s a factor of geography, and it’s a factor of us being between Scandinavia and frankly, Portugal. And for some reason the Isle of Thanet is one of these memorable places - it’s where you always get invaded, but actually it’s a very handy stopping-off point between Portugal and Scandinavia.

Now a lot of people have thought that the Mediterranean is where everything is happening in the Bronze Age - a lot of people will immediately think of places like Knossos and Mycenae – but believe me, it’s all happening up here, and it’s particularly in Scandinavia because they are sea power at that time. And this point of geography where we are between these two very dominant parts of Bronze Age culture is significant. This is a map of sea routes and trade routes for metal.

And we have one other point in our favour that put us on the European stage, because quite frankly, geographically we are a pimple on the backside of Europe, we really are! You know, people think that for the Roman period we were something – we weren’t! We were as far away as you could possibly be. But we have tin. I’m afraid I spent far too long trying to look for a picture of Poldark and a mine, and in fact his mine was a copper mine not a tin mine, and I really needed a tin mine! Because copper is more widespread – tin is the crucial thing, and if you’re going to make bronze, you need tin. And so our position on those sea routes, our position on those trade routes, and the fact that we actually had tin to trade has put us – and the Thames estuary particularly, because it’s on that trade route – that is what’s given us this position. And that’s why it’s so interesting, the initial results of the archaeo-metallurgical analysis of the hoard, which is showing these European links.

And so this is really what’s going to be coming out of this: who are the people that we’re seeing, and that’s why the DNA research and the isotopic research is so important. Bu it has to match up with the archaeo-metallurgy. We need to see where the material is coming from – it would be quite fun to see where our tin is going as well and compare that across Europe.

But seeing this whole network - I like the churn model actually, I like the churn of people, and I like particularly the churn of metals, and where and how it’s travelling. And this is what the hoard is going to tell us. You know, to some people it’s going to look like a slightly greenish pile of metal, but it’s going to be telling us so much more because the last 10 years has shifted our understanding dramatically of who we are and where we have come from. And that’s why I get so cross about things like Brexit! We really are European, there’s no getting away from it! You can do all you like, you can say you need a passport to go into Kent, but we are, really, all European. Rant over!

The Middle Bronze Age is a period of exponential change, but it is in a context. This is one of the famous jadeite axes from the Thames. This is Neolithic – it’s one of the things that I would steal from the museum if I really thought I could get away with it! And we have prestige items in small numbers being deposited in London in the Neolithic. Then we have this huge explosion in the Bronze Age, but it’s followed in the Iron Age and again, prestige objects with European influence are going into the river again. There going in much smaller numbers and they seem much more personal than in the Bronze Age, and that’s interesting in itself.

So the Waterloo Helmet and the Battersea Shield are classic examples of these prestige items, but they are much fewer in number. And again it’s why the hoard is going to give us much more of an insight into the contrast between the dry land deposits, the wetland deposit, but what is going on in this particular period? Is it to do with the sea level rise? Is it to do with the dynamism of those trade routes? Is it to do with the change in how the Thames is itself behaving, that suddenly happens at around 1500 BC and then changes?

So it’s always worth thinking in context of the estuary, looking both inland but particularly looking to Europe, and looking at where the influences are coming from. And seeing us very much – you know, this route to Scandinavia, when you start looking at maps like this, and of course while it would’ve been slightly different in the Bronze Age, the bulk of the changes in the coastline has happened by that point. But when you start looking at the sea ways, and when you start looking at when the metal is coming from, you being to see the context and why we’re very, very lucky to be on the Thames estuary and to be able to research in this area because the links are hugely interesting.

And I’ll conclude with this. It is little things like this that have factored our history and our origin story. So I’ll stop there and leave you with a pile of tin cans! Thank you.

Kate: Thank you so much Jane! That has just helped enormously to place everything into context and build understanding as well. And what is one of the interesting things about the Havering Hoard is that we’ve got the copper ingots contained within the hoard, but we have no tin in there at all. So we’ve got the droplets of metal, from casting metal; we’ve got one of the raw materials to make bronze. We’ve got miscast objects, we’ve got broken objects which are arguably for recycling. But where is the tin, and is the tin going elsewhere? So absolutely, that picture is really, really important.

So for now I’d like to introduce Andrew Gouldstone, the Site Manager for RSPB Marshes. Jane has just been talking about how important that marsh environment was, and how it would’ve been used. The RSPB Marshes are an incredibly important site because they are a historic survival, and so they give us an important glimpse into what the landscape would have looked like in the Bronze Age times, and Andrew can give us a really important insight into how to manage that site and the amount of careful balancing that it takes to keep it all in harmony. So I’ll hand over to him now, we’ve got Andrew on the screen and he’ll also be available on the screen later as part of the discussion. Thank you very much.

Andrew: Hi, welcome to the RSPB’s Rainham Marshes nature reserve. My name is Andrew Gouldstone and I’m lucky enough to be the Senior Site Manager here, working on the reserve. And if I can just take a moment to thank the Museum of London for inviting us to take part in this evening’s event.

The RSPB acquired the marshes here in the year 2000, from the MOD. And since then we’ve been working really hard with lots of volunteers, lots of partner support, to turn it into an amazing place both for wildlife and for people. And we’ve got some really important wildlife that lives here. We’re very close to London, we’re just inside the M25, yet we’ve got some amazing wildlife. And we’re also a really popular place with lots of visitors, we have lots of volunteers supporting our work, and we regularly welcome school groups to the reserve as well.

So the reserve and the marshes here are an amazing place for wildlife, and that’s despite a lot of activity going on around the reserve in this modern day and age. So we’ve got a lot of important strategic transport links along our northern boundary, that includes the high-speed train link to the Channel Tunnel, and fast links into Kent. We’ve got the River Thames on our south side. We’ve got industry, we’ve got residential areas, we’ve got a major landfill. So there’s a lot of activity going on around the reserve, yet it really is a great place to come and see lots of important wildlife.

Now today, we’re going to go on a short 20 minute or so tour, just looking at different parts of the reserve, some of the wildlife, some of the management that we do, and linking that in with the history, right back to the time of the Bronze Age, and the finding, of course, of the Havering Hoard. So we’ll set off now, and we’ll have a little tour taking in some of the other parts of the reserve as we go.

OK, so as you start to explore the trails that go around the marshes, you’ll find lots of these ditches that you’ll come close to and bridges that you’ll be able to cross over them, and from these it’s a really good opportunity to talk about the importance of the ditches that cross the marshes and the wildlife that lives in them. They tend to be with lots of reeds along the edges and it provides excellent habitat for a really key bit of wildlife here, which are water voles, which are declining nationally, but which really favour he network of ditches that criss-cross over the marshes here on the reserve. And these bridges, the trails as you walk around can provide excellent opportunities to see these animals. They breed and they habituate in burrows, but they come out and they chomp the vegetation along the sides of the ditches, and they can be very confiding and they can be really quite easy to see here on the reserve.

But also it’s a great place to look for other wildlife. We’re really fortunate in having lots of grass snakes that you can often see swimming across the water. They actually swim through the water as they chase their prey, which might be things like the marsh frogs that live here. But also a great place for seeing lots of damsel flies, lots of dragonflies patrolling, flying up and down the water systems, and hunting their insect prey as well. So lots of amazing wildlife that you can see as you walk around the marshes, especially in some of these ditch systems.

So we mentioned earlier about the longstanding association with the marshes and sort of military use. One of the earliest bits of evidence we have for that is from 1872, when an area at the western end was leased to the London Rifle Brigade as a rifle range. And indeed to this day, parts of the reserve are still widely known as the Purfleet Rifle Ranges.

We can see behind me here an example of some of the kind of built structures that still exist. This would have been a backstop for the shooting range. There probably would’ve been sand piled up in front of the wall that would’ve absorbed the impact of the bullets, and in front of that wall there is a structure that you can barely see from here, called a mantlet, which is an embankment that protects the soldiers operating the target mechanisms. So targets would’ve come up and down in front of that wall that you can see, protected by the embankment in front, known as the mantlet. So there’s a number of structures like that, that still exist across the marshes. We’ve got the shooting butts here, we’ve got the mantlets. Nearer the Visitor Centre there are ammunition magazines. There’s the cordite store where cordite, an element of gunpowder, would’ve been stored, and there’s a structure that’s known as a submarine tower.

So there’s a significant amount of very evident military history associated with the site still. And it’s something we have to be conscious of when we’re working on the site, that there is that chance of encountering a piece of unexploded ordinance. So we have to be very aware of that when we’re undertaking certain jobs on the reserve.

So there are two particular birds that the marshes now are incredibly important for, and that’s lapwing and redshank. And these are both birds that like damp, grazed grassland for their nesting. And unfortunately across the UK they’ve undergone very significant decline due to a change in land use, and various reasons associated with land use. But here on the marshes they are doing really well, and they are two birds that we know how to manage for.

When the RSPB acquire the site in 2000, there was perhaps half a dozen of each – half a dozen pairs of both lapwing and redshank. This year we had over 80 pairs of lapwing, and nearly 90 pairs of redshank. So they’re responding really well to the management that we’re doing on this reserve, and other RSPB nature reserves. And the way that we help lapwing and redshank, is they are ground-nesting birds, so we have to graze the grassland, and we use cattle to do that. And it’s important to get a nice structure to the grassland, so we’ve got these very short areas where they like to nest in the case of lapwing, and we’ve got these longer areas, these tussocky areas where redshank especially like to nest, but also where lapwing chicks will take cover.

So grazing with cattle is really important to get this structure to the grassland correct, but also managing water levels, and creating these very shallow areas of standing water. And we need to maintain those water levels in those areas through March, into June, so that these birds have plenty of insect food and earthworms that both the adults and the chicks can find to feed on. And if we get that mix of management correct, with the cattle grazing and the water levels, then that’s what’s helping our lapwing and our redshank here to do so well. And if you visit here in the spring, it’s a fantastic sight – the lapwings are displaying, tumbling through the sky; redshanks are calling and displaying – and it really is a very evocative backdrop to the sound of the marshes, and that intensity of behaviour with over 150 pairs of lapwing and redshank now nesting out here on the marshes. So it’s a real success story here, they’re doing really well and these marshes are now really important for both those birds.

So we’re now standing out on Wennington Marsh, and we’re really quite close to the location where the Havering Hoard was actually found, just behind the dual carriageway behind me. And we’re also very close to the area where the backdrop to the exhibition was filmed. And out here on Wennington Marsh, we know that we’ve got quite a lot of known historical interest that’s been identified through surveys. And these include drainage ditches and embankments and other features. And these are thought to date from the late Medieval through to the 1700 and 1800’s. And they would have been attempts on the part of people living nearby to reclaim the marshes, to drain them, and to put them to use.

What we do know though as well is that these marshes have never really been built on, they’ve not been ploughed for agriculture to the best of our knowledge. But probably grazing has been a constant use that’s gone on here, and we still graze the marshes today. And the way they’re named: Aveley, Wennington, Rainham Marshes probably is an indication of how the local villages by those same names – Aveley Wennington, Rainham – people there would have brought their cattle down to their bit of marsh to graze their livestock.

And it’s exciting to imagine what this landscape looked like even earlier than that – back to the Bronze Age, to the time this find dates to, the Havering Hoard. It probably looked not very dissimilar to how we see it today. And the wildlife that we’ve talked about using the marshes today would be probably very similar as well. And so standing here now on Wennington Marsh, we can imagine the inhabitants of that settlement, that enclosure, coming down here onto the marshes, perhaps grazing their cattle, perhaps doing some hunter gathering. And living very nearby to this amazing open landscape that we see here on Wennington Marsh still to this day.

Kate: Brilliant. Well, as I understand it, I think we can be de-masked for this. Holly is that right or am I committing some horrible faux pas right now? OK, we are all alright! So, thank you very much Andrew. That was an absolutely brilliant film that you created for us and it was really useful to be able to see the landscape what it looks like and some of the birds and other creatures that occupy it. So I have a long list of questions because I am fascinated by the three different aspects we’ve explored but there is also the opportunity if you’ve got any questions to raise as well. So, I will give you a moment if you’ve got any, if not, I’ll jump in with mine.

Alright, so in no particular order, Andrew, I was really interested in how you have the individual names of the marshes, Wellington, Aveley and it just really made me think about how those names may well be ancient and how this may be a named landscape in the Bronze Age but of course we have no records of the names. Do you know how old, what are the first records that we have of those marshes being named in that way?

Andrew: Unfortunately I don’t know the answer to that one I’m afraid. We kind of refer to the marshes as having this medieval sort of landscape to them. So, I think we can certainly say back to the late medieval period but earlier than that I’m not sure.

Kate: Excellent, Jane, can you add a little something?

Jane: I’m going to chip in. I don’t know for detail but ‘ham’ is a Saxon place name and ‘ton’ is also a Saxon place name so I suspect that they do go back further. I can’t off the top of my head think of Saxon archaeology out there but they are classic Saxon place names. ‘Ham’ particularly, we find ‘ham’, Ful-ham, Ham-mersmith these are very well known Saxon, Mitc-ham, some very nice Saxon brooches from there.

Kate: Fantastic, thank you. Just keeping an eye out in case anyone has any questions otherwise I am going to completely dominate this. Now, let me see, what was I wanting to ask? So, Tom, you were saying about how essentially it’s about people doing similar things in similar ways, can we guess at the motivations which caused people to move? Is there something bad, something catastrophic that’s prompting them to look for new areas? Are they reaching a population number which is causing them, like, we need new areas? Or is it just about the attractiveness of those new areas?

Tom: The answer is that we don’t really know unfortunately, but the sense that we get, the obvious answer is for trade. The people are moving around with objects that they are trading in, materials that they are trading from different regions. To some extent that is maybe what is producing these potentially back and forth movements that are influencing things. The fact that you seem to have a slight bias towards where people are moving from suggests that there is a particular region that potentially in the western Mediterranean or Iberia that is having a predominant influence. There is no evidence that that is a catastrophe because you’re not getting the complete changes, or massive changes in population areas suggesting there is loads of people moving, just potentially small groups and this is happening over quite a long period of time, as Jane was saying.

So you are getting this genetic change but it is very gradual over lots of time. So it’s potentially relatively small movements of people but sometimes over fairly long distances, from maybe around Southern France into Britain. So it’s not an event. It is clearly something that changes which means that you just have a lifestyle or a system within which people are quite mobile, the obvious answer is trade because you seem to get these shifts in what might be described as belief. Some of it could be, again quite speculative, almost religiously motivated, you know, almost evangelical to some extent, maybe, I don’t know. It’s a totally inappropriate term to apply but that kind of idea that people are moving to spread their belief. But yes, it is very difficult to pinpoint a single reason and there probably isn’t a single reason why people are moving around so much.

Kate: I think it’s like when you said it’s a mixture between the churn and the other term - churn is just sticking in my head because I really like it. Yes, I think we’ve got a question just here please.

Audience: Hello, do we have any cases of people from here in Iberia or Western Mediterranean?

Tom: So the change that we see in Iberia could be that, essentially, so people in Britain have lower levels of this European farmer ancestry than people in Iberia. So when we see the drop in Iberia in the early European famer ancestry that could be people from Britain moving into Iberia that’s causing that. When we’ve modelled it, like I said, that change seems to potentially more relate to these first generation migrants that we see in Kent and places. So it’s wherever they are from are having a predominant influence. But certainly, the problem with genetic models is you are assuming, because this is the only way to model the data well, fairly simple scenarios of one population moving there. If what you’re seeing is a complex of populations and lots of people moving in and out then it’s less visible to some extent. So, definitely it could be responsible, it’s difficult to prove outright because you get this strong signal from potentially somewhere in Southern France but yes, it’s definitely a possibility and I think definitely, again, people were moving back and forth through lots of different places.

Audience: You mentioned, everybody’s mentioned about trade and objects but I just wondered has any work been done on trade in animals. Have people looked at DNA of animals and seen whether trade in horses or dogs for example, because certainly I know in the Roman times British dogs were very highly prized and I just wonder if any further back there were any records.

Tom: Basically because we find humans more interesting!

Audience: Speak for yourself!

Tom: So, as a population we’re a very self-obsessed and narcissistic. There has been a lot of work on humans and not anywhere near as much on animals but that is starting to change for lots of reasons, partly again because we can understand the humans more by looking at the animals. One of the big questions is about lactase persistence because the people that we’re talking about, the vast majority of them still wouldn’t have been able to digest milk, even by the Late Bronze Age, so only sort of 3,000 years ago, and basically within the last 3,000 years the population of Britain has gone from none of them or next to none of the them being able to digest milk to almost everybody from Britain, well 75% of people from Britain, can digest milk.

So, there is some kind of natural selection, some very extreme natural selection that’s gone on for digestion of milk and understanding that will require us to understand the genetics of the cows as well, the animals from which we’re getting the milk as well. So people are turning to animals now and they’ll be addressing these questions about mobility of animals too with these things. But unfortunately our self-obsession means that we haven’t covered this yet.

Jane: Some work has been done on the stable isotopes of animals to look at some things. Again, in association with what people were doing, it tends to be more looking at the movement of animals, in the UK, in England. And it’s also looking at the stable isotopes of animals so they can be used as a marker for the people, but there are some interesting things that have come out, so looking at things like, where all the dead pigs on Neolithic and slightly later prehistoric sites, where’ve they come from? They come from directly around. Or in some cases, there are suggestions that the animals have travelled quite a long way to get to where they eventually die. So, there is some things, but yes you will normally find it buried in “and this is what the people did.”

Kate: Which makes it kind of interesting that we’ve spoken about how it is an important aspect on the marsh management of grazing and with the pastoral, as the shift, round about -1500, that date is sticking in my head now, of the shift more to the pastoral economy of the importance of cattle and sheep and the dominance, yet we are not using the cows for milk. That shift happens later on so therefore the cows are mainly meat and leather providing. Jane: And labour, the cows will be producing the labour, they’re the ones pulling the yards.

Tom: So this is the weird thing, we are using the cows’ milk and had been doing for thousands of years and this is why the story of lactase persistence is so strange because basically if you change milk into cheese or yoghurt then you remove a lot of the lactose and it’s vaguely digestible. There is lots of evidence of people in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age processing milk but it’s likely they weren’t drinking the raw milk, it’s likely they were changing it into cheese and yoghurt and things. So there’s something about drinking raw milk specifically and not changing it into cheese or yoghurt that becomes particularly important from this age but it’s difficult to see why because they don’t necessarily need to drink the milk, they could just change it to cheese and yoghurt. So it becomes even more of a mystery because essentially the evolutionary change that we see is so strong that this being able to digest the milk at some point must become essentially a matter of life and death. Yet, for it to have had such a large rise in the last 3,000 years and yet we don’t know why that should be.

Jane: This is really bizarre, I’ve never thought about this before. I mean at the moment, I’m sitting here thinking about would I prefer to drink beer than milk, there’s the whole drinking water issue and obviously, you know, if someone’s going to give me a nice cheese or a glass of milk. If it’s that stark then there’s got to be something that we ought to be able to see in the archaeological record that these people have to force themselves to cope with drinking milk.

Kate: Is it to do with crop failure? With farming being unreliable?

Jane: No, you’d see something that big because you’d have to have crop failure after failure after failure after failure, which we see in the 14th century because we see that with the catastrophic burial ground at St. Mary’s Spittle up by Liverpool street where we seem to see several thousand people that have died from famine at exactly at the same time. It predates the Black Death so those sorts of events tend to be absolutely massive and can be seen. This, I can’t think what, you’d think it’s got to be more of a cultural shift for whatever reason. Might it be anything to do with cultural norms around breastfeeding?

Tom: Yes it could be, so there’s a few theories potentially. There could be clean water sources, it’s a clean water source. There is no reason why that would be any more important in these periods than in previous periods. There’s the idea that it means that you can wean children earlier, which potentially means you can have more children, you can have them closer together because you can have another child before you technically stop breastfeeding the other child because you can just feed it cows’ milk. That’s one potential, because the point about selection is that its, it’s not survival of the fittest to some extent, it is the ability to reproduce children that, who live on to reproduce themselves so it’s the ability to reproduce children who live on to adulthood, that is biological fitness. So in that sense anything that helps with infant mortality is going to have a big, and having more children that are likely to live to adulthood is going to have a big influence so it could be something to do with cultural shifts like that. But we don’t really know at the moment.

Audience: You talked about an awful lot of young male skulls. Young men are the ones that go to war, always. Most of the settlements seem to be very small, sort of single possibly two families, was there not a time when the idea of land ownership started to rise? You got the institution of chiefs with their followers, was that not happening at around - 1500?

Jane: Yes, but we’re not seeing it manifested on the ground, and this is very odd. You’ve hit the nail on the head because I think at some point I start getting very, very cross at this point. I am an archaeologist so I’m an idealist, I’m a socialist and I love a caring sharing society that isn’t all about men and chiefs and swords! And yet the Bronze Age it is still a bit about men and swords and probably chiefs. So yes, it’s there but we can’t see where they were living and that’s the odd thing. So, is it, and again, these are very long time periods that we’re talking about. I mean from now back to 1945 is a blink of an eye in the chronologies that we’re looking at.

If you think that people are potentially living in these very small farmsteads, hamlets and there are quite a lot of them. It may be that periodically every 50 years or so there’s a muster and the young men are called out, but they’re not living in pre urban settlements, they’re not living in aggregated settlements and so we are seeing where the small groups live and the swords and the skulls are representations of the events that take place maybe once every 50 years or so. So it’s something that we’ve not bottomed out yet.

Kate: There’s also the question of where are the women being buried?

Jane: Some of them are women - honestly some of them are! And I was a bit disappointed, but it is interesting because if this trope holds true of most of the skulls in the Bronze Age are men, there are some women and there are some older women but yes, they’re not terribly visible.

Kate: In an interesting paper that I read recently about the curation of human remains – where it is possible, we don’t have a lot of Bronze Age human remains - and one theory about that is because the bones are being carried around. The bones are being changed into artefacts, again possibly to facilitate possibly carrying the around. And could it be that the women were links to the ancestors. The women were the identifiers of the relationships between groups, between families, between communities and so it’s less about young fighty men and more about the role of women in society. And how that stands, you know just to flip it around so we’re not just talking about violent young men.

Jane: It would be interesting to see the difference between the ones coming out of the river, the thing is there are an awful lot coming out of the river and very little coming out of anywhere else. Is this not your paper that Kate’s referring to?

Tom: Yes it was. I was just being humble!

Jane: Yes actually I have read it quite recently as well! Because it was really interesting that they weren’t hanging on to them for very long were they? Were there, was it parity of male/female?

Tom: Yes it more or less was - particularly in the Middle to Late Bronze Age. Obviously there was a big change where in the Early Bronze Age they were all coming out of graves, but when you start getting settlements in the Middle/Late Bronze Age then you get them on settlements and you don’t really have any graves - well you do have the odd one or two graves, but they are coming from settlements.

But yes, there were males, females, also a lot of children as well that seem to be part of it as well, so there didn’t seem to be as much of a bias in that sense. But it’s interesting to compare them to the river skulls, which is something quite different and where there does seem to be more of a bias there. I don’t know what would necessarily explain that but it looks like people were hanging onto stuff. The problem is we didn’t really have all that many samples that we looked at, so there could be more of a bias. And the problem was these curated bits of bone, like a leg or an arm or a head, it’s not always easy to estimate sex. So we had a majority of them were either female question mark, or unsexable. So it’s difficult to say but I think broadly there was parity in the sexes and ages as well.

Audience: Sorry, could I just clarify something please - regarding the hoard, the Havering Hoard. Was it buried, these 4 different hoards, was it buried at the same time and do they cover the same period? I’ve only had a very, very brief look at the exhibition but I noticed that 4 theories are put forward and I didn’t know if the panel had a preferred theory as to why they were buried? And just one quick one for Andrew, was the, were the marshes gifted to the RSPB from the MOD?

Andrew: No. So it was a purchase at the time. Kate: The question going back about the Havering Hoard, and we call it one hoard, divided into four parts buried in four different places, so it very much looks like it is just one hoard and that it was buried all at the same time. How is was divided up, how it was buried - it was all within one pit and so they are really very close to each other and we know that they are definitely all buried at pretty much the same time because of the mixture of objects that are across all four.

So a classic example is that we’ve got the two terret rings, which go onto a cart or chariot and they are to stop the horses reigns from getting tangled up, and we have got one in one hoard and one in a different hoard and these are really unusual artefacts. So to get two together that weren’t associated with each other - no, the mixture of stuff definitely all buried all at the same time. In terms of favourite theories, we’ve left it open for a very good reason, but also I suspect my own personal thoughts is that it’s very much, like with the movement of people, it’s a mixture, of all of them probably coming together. For me, my money is spiritual, it’s all about spiritual.

Jane: I’m a scientist I look for functional things because once you have data you can then start to take it a bit further. What I would say about this is, it’s exceptional and it’s unusual. The way it’s buried is unusual, it’s in the ditch of an enclosure, the particular position in the ditch is relevant. It’s central, it’s not sort of chucked in the side it’s very clearly placed. Thought has gone into it.

Now the “is it one is it four?” is something to consider, and this is a point where I want to be really boring and say I want to know how much each weighed, how easy is it to carry? Could one person have carried all four in one big bag? Could one person only have carried a quarter of it in one big bag? So it is that sort of thing. But it’s quite hard work smashing up bits of bronze, some have been deliberately broken, so there’s – I’m not going to say I know why, but I’m going to say it’s unusual, it’s exceptional, the positioning is strange, thought has gone into it. It’s not an afterthought, it’s not “we’re moving on, let’s just bung it to the side, we might come back in a year’s time.” More thought has gone into it than that.

Kate: I also think the proximity to the marshes and the waterways are really significant, because we can see where it’s lined up with the settlement. But this is a really, really important landscape. You know, if I use the word liminal, it is that thing of transition, of transformation. Marshes, they’re not quite land, they’re not quite water, and they change – and I’ve got a question for Andrew in a bit about how they change. So it’s a significant spot for so many different reasons, but I’ll hand over to the question there.

Audience: Yes, I just wanted to ask a little bit, because you’ve given us different aspects of the discovery of this hoard, and you are talking about almost settlements, communities – whether they’re bands, tribes – how to describe them in those early times is quite difficult. But what evidence do you have of infectious diseases taking out some of these people? And certainly when you were talking about offspring – babies growing to adulthood, my bet is that most of them would not have survived childhood. But these aren’t very crowded communities, like big cities like we have nowadays, but there would have been infectious diseases. Did you see any evidence in the skulls that you’ve recovered, or anything in the hoards that you’ve dug up of the period?

Jane: There’s more trauma than disease in the ones that Nicola’s looked at, but she is only looking at the ones out of the river. It’s more nasty, brutish and short, rather than infectious diseases. Now a number of infectious diseases do not pronounce on the human remains - if they take you out quickly enough you don’t get evidence. If someone dies of something in a fortnight that’s not going to pronounce on the skeleton.

[Comment about proximity to the river]

Jane: Well the site is up above it. And this is the interesting thing, the settlements are sat above the marshes, so there are the issues around would there have been mosquitoes, would there have been things like malaria, would there have been things like miasmas going around. But the settlements are sat up above it, we see these trackways going into the marshes and on the whole they’re always north-south, and it looks like stock are being taken onto the marshes, presumably in the summer.

But infectious diseases we see less of. You see some evidence, but on the whole it’s more trauma that you’re seeing. And it’s a very interesting point, what diseases would have been around, but also how much care was taken. And I was delighted to see downstairs the Chelsea Skull. Because actually I had a picture in, and when I was purging my talk from about 80 slides I did take out the one of me holding up the Chelsea Skull. The reason why the Chelsea Skull is so important, is it’s the one with the great big hole in. It’s trepanned - I believe the radio carbon range is along the lines of 1600 to 1400 cal BC – but the wound from the trepanation, from the cutting the hole, has partially healed. So we know that not only did people perform surgery at this date, they performed it well enough that the person survived, probably for at least 3 months.

So care was being taken and we’ve got evidence for that, and yes there will be some infectious diseases and I’m not thinking quite what they might be now, but trauma is what we notice more. And I’m afraid this is trauma in the case of people being knocked around, or hacked around. So there would have been some, but this is a society that lives off the land in a hard way, and they’re taking care of each other as you can see very particularly from the Chelsea Skull. So if you didn’t go and peer at it downstairs, it’s the top of the cranium, in the cases on that side of the exhibition, with a hole. And if you look at you’ll see that it’s not sharp edges, it has partially re-healed.

Tom: So ancient DNA is potentially going to help with this a bit. As Jane said, if there’s lots of trauma going on, then it’s probably going to be more along the lines of the trauma. But what we can now do with ancient DNA is, as well as getting human DNA out of skeletons, we also get all the bacteria, and sometimes virus and other nasties that come with them. I mean, a lot of this is just microorganisms from the soil, but also within that you can get survival of diseases as well.

Again, this is something that has only emerged out of ancient DNA in the past couple of years, but essentially you can just screen the samples for every disease that we have a genome for, we can just test for it inside the skeleton. So this will include diseases that don’t leave a mark on the skeleton. It is dependent on the DNA from those diseases preserving, but if that disease was in that person when they died in their bloodstream then we should be able to detect it.

So you can imagine in the future we’ll be able to see instances where the prevalence of a particular disease rises and falls – potentially we might be able to see malaria as well. So some of these questions might be helped to answer in the future. It’s probably not worth it when someone’s had their head caved in, because it’s pretty obvious how they died! But for instance, looking at Neolithic and Bronze Age remains from different parts of Europe has evidence for early prehistoric plague epidemics, in Neolithic Sweden and then in the Bronze Age Steppe. There’s a lot of people essentially doing fishing expeditions, because eventually you will find something interesting when you look for pathogens in ancient remains. Because as long as it’s old, it doesn’t matter what pathogen it is, it’s going to be interesting and it’s going to be useful looking at the evolutionary history of that pathogen.

Audience: Have you been able to establish the size of the population in the settlement? Because it doesn’t look like it’s a very big area, and there are a lot of artefacts. So it sort of suggests that the people that did live there were incredibly rich!

Kate: The hoard contains 453 bronze artefacts. The amount of potter and other finds that we have got from the site is very few in comparison. So what Archaeological Solutions – the unit who excavated the site – their theory is that we’re looking at one family group who may well have lived, possibly only seasonally, within this ditched enclosure, and then the hoard is potentially unrelated to the residents of the enclosure. And that it may have been buried here because it would’ve been a landmark, it would’ve been identifiable, maybe it is the relationship of our site within the landscape. But I don’t believe that the contents of the hoard are one person’s belongings. I think that it’s more likely that this is a pattern of behaviour that was understood, and that it was a sort of coming together, a collection of material for the specific reason of burying it as a hoard. I don’t know if anyone else would like to address?

Jane: Smaller versions of these are sometimes known as founder’s hoards, and it’s the metal worker – so it’s not sort of a subsistence family, it’s a particular craft. And this is where we can start getting a bit weird, and talking about the ways of crafts! Bronze casting – is there a film of bronze casting downstairs? I saw it online – is incredibly complicated and difficult and complex, and we think probably, based on anthropology really rather than making it up as archaeologists, we think that the bronze casters, the people that made the objects, were probably quite other, quite different from the run of the mill subsistence farming types.

And so when you find something like this, it is traces of those particular people, and yes potentially the settlement is unrelated to the people behind the hoard. So have you got one bronze founder? Has that person got apprentices, is there a small group of them? Because we think they were peripatetic. We think that you didn’t go to a shop and order your sword – the bronze founders moved around. And we find this with things like moulds. So one of the sites that we compare this one to is the site at South Hornchurch, and there were mould fragments found from casting of swords I think – was it swords or spears? Swords, it is swords – and so it may be that the bronze founder was only passing through. They might have stayed for a bit, might have fulfilled the orders, and that this is potentially a founder’s hoard.

The question that we had earlier was “what do you think it’s doing there?” If it was smaller, less well lined up, then potentially it’s that, it’s a founder’s hoard, it’s been left. So the bronze smith is doing his rounds – it’s almost like hop-pickers going to Kent, the other way around, the person that makes the sword is trundling around – and has left a cache of material to be melted down to make the next ones.

So we need to see the objects as part of a chain of operation, but also as part of some people that are moving around and creating these objects. I’ve completely forgotten what the question is! But I’m really interested in this, how you match the people up with the place and the material, and what that chain is doing. But certainly the bronze workers, bronze founders are very much thought to be highly specialised, quite other, quite special, quite prized people.

[Question about the value of the broken items in the hoard] Jane: Oh no, it would really be worth nicking! The breaking of the objects can be very functional, because bronze is one of the great things that you can melt down and remake. Iron is a complete bugger in this respect, because it’s really, really difficult to get new iron out of old iron. But bronze you can, you can melt it down. But it helps if it’s all in even sized bits – I’m going to think of baking at this point! So if your bits are all the same size, they’ll bake at the same time. But to breaking bronze is quite hard work. Brilliantly, Matt Knight, who is one of the great hoard experts, for some research recently he went and asked a metal worker how to do this, because he’d been trying to do it by thumping swords with hammers and it just wasn’t working at all. And the metal worker said, “Well you’ve got to heat it up first, you idiot!” So he shoved a sword in a furnace and then belted the end of it and it broke off exactly – exactly as we see these fragment.

So no, it would’ve been highly nickable because half the work has been done for you. So if you have whole objects you have to heat them up, then break them, cool them down, then rework them. So no it would’ve been very, very nickable.

Kate: But the slight argument, before you get completely wedded to the practical theory that this is a store for a metal worker, is the sheer quantity of hoards that we’ve got across the country, and of course across Europe. That is a huge stash of bronze that has been buried into the ground. You know at the end of the Bronze Age, beginning of the Iron Age there isn’t just a switch of bronze is no longer wanted, so that is a huge raw material that’s there.

Also, in our hoard we’ve got a lot of broken up material, but our bits don’t match up. We’ve got various bits of sword, and none of them, like a magic jigsaw puzzle, can be fitted together. And this is a really typical thing for hoards. We’ve never been able to get all the hoards together to go “right I’ve got this bit of sword, who else’s can match it together?”

So there’s some form of mixing that’s going on. There’s also bits that are in the hoard – there’s a decision, what gets to go into the hoard, because it doesn’t reflect a complete cross-section of the tools that there would have been in society, in the community at that time. So it isn’t a bit of everything that has gone in as you might expect if this is just raw materials plus recycling. So there’s that aspect as well. I can go on, but I won’t, I’ll stop there!

Jane: It’s a bit of a bollocks offering for the gods! If we’re to use the technical term.

Kate: 45kg of an offering for the gods!

Jane: Yes! One jadeite axe, I can see. Tom: Paving a slight middle ground here – and potentially constructing a straw man – it could be conceivable that this is functional in the sense of being a storage for later but that there are rules that dictate what you’re supposed to do when you are keeping stuff or storing something for later that involves ritual. You know, if you’re looking for the help of a god, that is a functional thing, there isn’t a division between the functional and the ritual really. And undoubtedly there would have been some ritual involved that would seem to us ritual, but was actually what they regard as functional, because the specific rules that you’re supposed to follow when you’re doing these sorts of things, that don’t make sense to us but would’ve made sense to them. And I don’t think that either of you would disagree with that anyway!

Kate: Andrew, as someone who lives and works so close to the natural world, what’s your take on it? Why do you think that so much bronze has been put right here in the landscape?

Andrew: That’s a really unfair question! I’ve got nothing to add to what you’ve all been saying, I really wouldn’t know! But I think you’re right, it’s a fantastic landscape that still exists to this day. And to think that the people that handled these artefacts would’ve made use of this landscape that we can still see today, that we still work amongst and that visitors and come and appreciate, is quite an amazing thought. It continues to be a very special place that is loved by people, valued by people – we use it in a different way, but it is still massively valued and used by people to this day.

Jane: I’s worth noting that the Havering Hoard site is a dry land site, it’s just above the marsh, so it means that organic material hasn’t survived. So we’re talking about the hoard as if it’s the be all and end all, but what other objects were there that have not survived? We mention that they may have been in leather bags – they may have been in timber boxes, there may have been bones there, there may have been worked leather, there may have been worked wood there. So we are hypothesising with an unknown amount of material, of what we have, compared to what is missing.

And it’s worth noticing that the marshes have produced quite a lot of organic material, and that we do find objects that speak to a more spiritual dimension from the marshes. And probably the most famous one, and one of my favourites, is the Dagenham Idol. It’s earlier, it dates to the Late Neolithic period, and it’s a carved – you can’t really say wooden doll, because it has unusual…attributes that I will leave you to think about, or go and look at the reconstruction in the London Wall Museum of London.

So yes, we’re arguing happily about whether it’s functional, whether it’s offering, whether it’s spiritual, but we are hypothesising without the organic material. And if you look around the room now, you’ll see how much organic material we hold as individuals. So what’s missing? What would there have been out on the marshes that was being used? Was there a boat used by the people on this site to get out into the marshes, to get down onto the river? What are we missing? And this unfortunately is always the problem with archaeologists, because we can argue ourselves into any heightened rage that we like about whether it’s spiritual, or whether it’s functional, or whether it’s ritual, or whether it’s scientific, but we are missing so much and we can’t even quantify what we’re missing. And that’s the really frustrating thing about this site. What went with this material that we’re never going to know was there.

Tom: It reminds me of sites like Must Farm as well, where you do have potentially all the organic stuff. And the thing with that site is that at least Mark Knight who dug it – other people have tried, because there’s just such a mass of material from there, organic and otherwise – some people have tried to spin it as it must be this big ritual centre. But Mark’s view, and I think I support him, is that it’s just completely mundane. It’s quite a melancholy thought that Must Farm is really mundane, because you see how much doesn’t survive. And the sense that all of that richness and complexity that’s there is just the norm, but most of the time we don’t see it and we’re trying to make arguments from only the stuff that we do see.

Kate: You’re so right, and that is the everyday aspect that is just so important. And it’s one of the reasons I love prehistory, I have a very vivid imagination! And you do take the very few dots of evidence that we have and I can make a whole story up from it! And on that note, I need to say thank you so much to all of our speakers who have contributed towards an amazing panel discussion. I would say, if you haven’t visited RSPB Rainham Marshes, it is an amazing site and the café is very good as well! So I’d say please do visit. And also come and see the exhibition if you haven’t yet! Thank you very much.