Bronze Age Worlds: Life and Landscape TRANSCRIPT Speakers
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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.