Museum of London Archaeology – förlag

Archaeological excavations at Shard Place, Southwark, by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) revealed evidence of funerary activity associated with old St Thomas’s Hospital. The discovery of 811 inhumations, dating from the 17th to early 18th century exposed the intensive nature of burial activity in an area immediately to the south-east of the hospital buildings. This burial assemblage, together with dumps of hospital waste and evidence of structural remains associated with the 18th-century hospital rebuilding, enhances our knowledge of the early history of this London institution.The study of the skeletal remains of 794 individuals, the majority of whom must have been inmates at St Thomas’s Hospital, provides an insight into the health of the population and the diseases from which they suffered. The demographic structure of the burial sample reveals elevated vulnerability in adolescence and early adulthood, an indication of the health risks inherent within an increasingly crowded urban landscape. The City’s poor endured cramped living conditions and rising levels of pollution. Many migrated to London in search of jobs as labourers, or servants and apprentices. The burial ground revealed early evidence of hospital medical practice in the form of surgical limb amputation. Skeletal evidence of venereal syphilis was also identified, consistent with records of specialist ‘foul wards’ at St Thomas’s Hospital, provided for those suffering from this chronic condition.

The discovery of one of Roman Londons most significant buildings - its amphitheatre - underneath the medieval Guildhall resulted from major archaeological excavations which took place between 1985 and 1999 as part of the City of London Corporations ambitious programme of redevelopment at the Guildhall. The history of the Guildhall and its precinct from the 12th to the 20th centuries is the subject of a companion volume. This book describes the construction, development and disuse of the amphitheatre, from the 1st to 4th centuries AD. Constructed on relatively low ground in the north-west part of Londinium, the first amphitheatre was built in c AD 74 of timber. Evidence was recovered for the eastern entrance, arena palisade, bank for seating and associated drains. The amphitheatre was rebuilt shortly after AD 120, with masonry foundations and walls, associated with new timber stands. The evidence allows conjectural reconstruction and comparison with other British amphitheatres. Abandoned by the mid 4th century, the amphitheatre was largely demolished and sealed by dark earth. The arena may have survived as an oval depression until the area was reoccupied in the 11th century. Significant finds assemblages include an early 2nd-century dump of glass cullet, lead curses from the arena surface and samian pottery with gladiatorial motifs. The amphitheatres remains are preserved and displayed in the basement of the new Guildhall Art Gallery.

In 2003 archaeologists discovered an intact princely burial between busy Priory Crescent and the railway line near Priory Park in Prittlewell. A find of international significance, this is the richest and most important Anglo-Saxon burial found since the 1939 discovery of the great ship burial at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. The lavishly furnished wooden chamber beneath a mound contained the coffin of a high-status man, evidently a Christian, who died at the end of the 6th century AD. The results of years of study of the excavated evidence are described and illustrated here to provide an account of the burial and the grave goods, and the information they give us about the East Saxon kingdom, where the man lived, and its contacts with Kent, Francia and the Christian Mediterranean.

London’s Spitalfields Market was the location of one of the city’s largest archaeological excavations, carried out by MOLA between 1991 and 2007. This book presents the archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence for Roman activity here, to the north-east of the urban settlement and the site of a series of burial grounds on the east side of Ermine Street. Burial began here c AD 120 and continued into the 4th century AD. Excavation revealed a number of ditched enclosures, some used for the interment of 169 inhumations and five cremation burials, some for other purposes. Among the early burials men outnumbered women by five to one, but by the later 3rd and 4th centuries AD a more even sex ratio prevailed. Subadults were well represented, with one area apparently set aside for the burial of neonates and children. The cemetery attracted some particularly wealthy 4th-century AD burials, including at least two in stone sarcophagi, one of which contained an inner, decorated, lead coffin enclosing a young woman. She had been anointed with imported resins and buried in fine clothing, with unusual glassware and jet items. Some burial rites and grave goods are more familiar from Continental cemeteries, emphasising the cosmopolitan and mobile nature of London’s population.

Additional burial areas for the parish of St James Westminster in the 17th to 18th century were excavated in 2008–9. As the northern part of the parish around Soho grew and its population increased from the mid 17th century, pressure mounted on burial space in the churchyard on Piccadilly and on existing support structures for the least fortunate members of society. In response, the lower ground (the early extramural burial ground, 1695–1733) and the upper ground (the later extramural burial ground, 1733–90) were opened in succession, along with the new workhouse complex (1725–1913) and the workhouse burial ground (1733–93). In the later 19th to 20th century public baths were constructed over part of the site and the workhouse was repurposed and then redeveloped.The three burial areas were used intensively and a total of 2553 burials were recorded. Intra-site comparisons exploring demographic and health profiles show a higher proportion of adult females in the workhouse population and a disproportionately low number of childhood deaths across all three grounds. Full osteological analysis of 1786 skeletons revealed the wide range of conditions afflicting the buried population. Higher overall rates of pathological bone conditions, including infectious disease and trauma, were identified, however, in the workhouse burials when compared to the extramural grounds. Together with historical and archaeological evidence, these results and those from comparative contemporary sites help place the lives of the urban poor and destitute within the wider context of the 17th and 18th centuries.