Many late-seventeenth-century bottles have been brought up from submarine excavations on the site of the submerged Jamaican city of Port Royal, which sank in the great earthquake of 1692, but they were retrieved only with great difficulty and are in such poor condition that the effort was hardly worthwhile. Much better preserved, and lying in relatively clear water on the other side of Kingston harbor, were many later bottles discarded from the military post at Port Henderson, no small number of which have been rounded up by Sunday-afternoon scuba divers and shipped to America. That was before the Jamaican government very properly made it an offense to export its national antiquities; but unfortunately it is a law that is hard to enforce, and not long ago I saw four excellent mid-eighteenth-century bottles that had passed through the hands of a Charleston dealer after being smuggled off the island. The government of Guyana (previously British Guiana) has taken a similar step to protect its treasures—but not before literally hundreds of bottles and other artifacts were shipped out by a single team of prospectors.
It is thoroughly desirable that national governments should concern themselves with the protection and retention of their antiquities, for if they do not, no one else will. Furthermore, even if many of the relics are barely a century old, there is still no reason for letting foreigners carry them off—particularly if their motives are strictly mercenary. Any of us who tampers with the remains of the past has a moral responsibility to it, and that is in no way diminished by the claim that we are absconding with the loot in the name of historical research. Besides, the responsibility is not only moral, it is one of legality. Hardly a square inch of the earth exists that is not on record as being owned by someone, and therefore the removal of anything from it (or even setting foot on it) without permission can land us in trouble.
As an antiquary who resorts to archaeological excavation as a means of obtaining artifactual information, I am well aware that digging is inherently destructive. The earth should never be disturbed solely to obtain collectable objects no matter whether the collector is a curator in a great museum or a kid with a metal detector. It is the relationship between the artifacts and the layers of the soil in which they lie that reveals when and how they got there; deny us that information and the object has no more to say than if it had been bought from an antique dealer who declined to reveal where or from whom it was obtained. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the small and collectable items that have been found in the ground and now grace museum and private collections have been robbed of their pedigrees and can tell us no more of their history than is to be learned from their physical appearance. Not all “found” objects are imbued with heavy archaeological significance, however. The girl who picked up the wine bottle at low tide on the York River was not wresting her treasure from some immensely meaningful mud. There was no telling how the bottle came to be where it was; it could have been thrown from the shore, washed out of a refuse pit dug into a now eroded bank, or lost from a capsized boat.
What must rank as the easiest and, perhaps, the biggest bonanza for the something-for-nothing collector was discovered in London during the Second World War. The first to exploit it was the late Robin Green, who claimed that while serving as a member of the London Fire Brigade fighting a blaze in an incendiary-bombed warehouse, he fell overboard from a fireboat into the Thames, sank to the river bottom, and then rose to the surface with the bowl of an eighteenth-century tobacco pipe in his hand. This, so he said, led him to return to the river at low tide where he found the shore strewn with pipes, broken pottery, jewelry, coins, and a multitude of other artifacts of every age from Roman times to the twentieth century. In the years following his archaeological baptism by immersion, Green assembled a large collection of small antiquities from the Thames and eventually sold them to London’s Guildhall Museum.
Robin Green was by no means the first collector to recognize that the Thames foreshore had much to offer, but he was the first to appreciate that comparatively recent and fragmentary objects were historically interesting. For more than a century before he came on the scene, the river had been supplying collectors (and eventually, museums) with some of the finest of Britain’s ancient art objects. Perhaps the most famous of these antiquities are the magnificent Iron Age bronze shield found at Battersea and a horned helmet of the first century B.C., found near Waterloo Bridge. Many of the most spectacular discoveries were made in the second quarter of the nineteenth century by two indefatigable antiquaries, Thomas Layton and Charles Roach Smith, who not only patroled the shores themselves, but also paid watermen and laborers to bring them whatever they found.
Layton lived at Brentford and confined his river hunting largely to the stretch of it that flowed from Teddington down to Chelsea, while Roach Smith concentrated on the lower reaches that passed through the City of London. Though both were private collectors, their collections ended up in the public domain; Layton’s was first given to the Brentford Museum and later to the London Museum, and, in 1856, Roach Smith’s principal London discoveries were sold for the then princely sum of £2,000 to provide the British Museum with a nucleus for its Romano-British gallery. The kinds of objects that both men collected were generally self-evidently interesting and ancient: Bronze Age swords, bronze cauldrons, Neolithic urns, an Iron Age wooden tankard bound in bronze, a water clock, coins, and medieval weapons. They were not excited by broken seventeenth-century pottery and would have expressed no enthusiasm for Robin Green’s clay pipe.
Although a tremendous number of archaeologically valuable objects have been recovered from the Thames all the way from Reading to Greenwich, many of the most significant have come from the vicinity of London Bridge. There have now been at least five bridges in that general location, beginning with a Roman bridge leading into Londinium, and ending with the present structure built in 1972. The latter replaced the 1832 bridge which was transplanted to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, to become what must surely rank as one of the world’s more improbable collector’s items.
The most dramatic relic retrieved during the building of the nineteenth-century London Bridge was a massive bronze head of the emperor Hadrian believed to have come from a statue that once stood in the city’s forum. The majority of the treasures from the bridge site were not of such large size, however, and although some clearly found their way into the water by accident, most of them were thrown there deliberately, for luck—though that can hardly explain the presence there of a pair of elaborately decorated bronze forceps thought to have been used in the ritual of self-emasculation practiced by candidates for priesthood in the temple of Cybele, the Roman mother goddess.
The forceps were among Roach Smith’s more remarkable discoveries, but they were no more remarkable than his astonishing collector’s luck. Two examples will suffice. Among the relics he recovered from dredgers working on the bridge site was a headless, armless, and partly legless bronze figure of either Jupiter or Mercury. The gravel in which it was found was dumped into barges, carried upriver, and deposited along the banks at Hammersmith, Barnes, and Putney to build up the towpaths, and cottagers living nearby would sift through it in search of old coins which they later sold to London collectors. One such haul that happened to be offered to Roach Smith included a leg from his statue. From another of the bridge dredgers came a small bronze, fanlike object that neither Roach Smith nor his antiquarian friends could identify. Two years later, while watching further dredging in the same spot, he saw the bronze figure of a chickenlike bird lying amid the pebbles. It had lost its tail—which of course turned out to be the fan-shaped object and which, when reunited, turned the chicken into a peacock (Fig. 32).
Unfortunately I had but one opportunity to follow that closely in Roach Smith’s footsteps. On a cold and rainy November day in 1952 I stood in the open hold of a dredger’s barge, lying immediately below the 1832 bridge and over the site of the medieval London Bridge of nursery rhyme renown. As the river mud and gravel were dumped aboard, I had great hopes of being showered with treasures
of every shape and age; but all I found was a single coin from the reign of the Roman emperor Vespasian (A.D. 69–79) and a small collection of Victorian pennies and halfpennies. It was not one of my better days, though I suppose that over the years I have enjoyed more than my share of good luck, coincidences, or whatever one cares to call being in the right place at the right time. In the summer of the same year, 1952, I found the base of a small delftware bowl lying face down in the mud at Queenhithe Dock. I use the word face advisedly for that was what was painted on the inside of the bowl, a smiling, mustachioed profile with so roguish an eye that it seemed to be shouting, “Hey, look at me!” In the twenty years that have passed since I found it, I have shown the fragment to most of the foremost specialists in English ceramics, but no one admits to having seen anything like it. The best they have been able to suggest is that the painting was the work of a bored delft decorator who was simply playing around, in which case it would almost certainly be one of a kind, a unique piece. But it isn’t. In 1961, while excavating at Tutter’s Neck plantation in Virginia, I found another identical base, and although in poor condition, the laughing eye and the twirling mustache leave no doubt that the American example is the work of the same painter (Fig. 33). So now there are two identical objects that no living collector or specialist has seen before, and I often wonder why fortune should have chosen me to find them both.
32. Roman figures of Jupiter and a peacock found in the 1820s during the building of London Bridge. The bird and its tail were found at the same spot, though two years apart, but the disarticulated leg was picked up ten miles upstream at Barnes, where the dredged gravel was dumped along the shore. Jupiter height 12⅛ inches, peacock 2¼ inches.
My own searches along the shores of the Thames extended over a period of eight years and provided some of the most stimulating and exciting hours of my life. I cannot deny that this was something-for-nothing treasure hunting in its simplest form, yet at the same time it was vastly instructive. The shores were strewn with artifacts of every period of London’s history—just as Robin Green had said they were (Figs. 34–36). The trick was to avoid sinking into the mud and then to distinguish between the historically interesting and the purely junky junk. On a single outing my discoveries ranged from a coin of the third-century Roman emperor Gallienus and a fifteenth-century leather shoe, to a German incendiary bomb and a portable bus stop, this last presumably thrown from nearby Southwark Bridge by a disgruntled, would-be passenger whose bus failed to show up.
33. Base fragments from two delftware salts, both decorated on the interior with a caricature of a mustachioed gallant. That on the left was found in the Thames and that on the right at Tutter’s Neck in Virginia. No other examples are known. About 1670. Base diameter 1¾ inches.
34. Mudlarking on the Thames foreshore at Dowgate below Southwark Bridge.
35. An unposed “still life” on the Thames foreshore near Southwark Bridge. Visible in the picture are numerous fragments of clay tobacco-pipe stems; at left center is a pipe bowl of about 1670 and above it another dating from the early eighteenth century. Below the latter is a Roman or medieval earthenware spindle whorl used in spinning wool. In the center is a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century iron buckle lying on the remains of an eighteenth-century shoe; to its upper right is the inverted base of an early-sixteenth-century Rhenish stoneware mug. The fish is modern.
36. The trick is telling the best rubbish from the worst. Both these toy pistols were found on the Thames foreshore near Queenhithe Dock; the brass example dates from about 1600 and the iron one from around 1920.
About fifty yards below Southwark Bridge a tributary named the Walbrook had once flowed into the Thames, and it was there that the Roman city wall had an opening to permit seagoing ships to enter and unload alongside the Walbrook’s wharves; at least that has been the conclusion long favored by London historians. Although the Walbrook had been roofed over in medieval times, and when I knew it emerged into the Thames through an unromantic sewer pipe, it was there, at Dowgate, that many of the more interesting Roman objects were found, not the least of them being a Roman matron’s bronze manicure set. From the same area came a miniature wine jar cast in lead and whose shape strongly suggests that it, too, may be of Roman date. This spot was also a good source of Roman coins, though most of them dated from the third and fourth centuries and were of poor quality and small size. Indeed, the smallest were barely five millimeters in diameter and took a good deal of finding!
Although, as I have noted, the Walbrook was vaulted over and squeezed into a conduit in the fifteenth century, its ancient bed has been revealed whenever buildings have been erected over it. Thus, for example, foundation digging in Queen Victoria Street in 1871 exposed the river’s peatlike silt and in it what was reported to be a barge containing the calcined remains of a cargo of grain. Unfortunately, few details of this discovery have been preserved, and its age was either undetermined or unrecorded.
I first saw and smelled the rich, black silt of the Walbrook in 1949 when the eastern edge of its flood plain was exposed during the construction of the first city office building to be erected after the war. Roman houses had stood on piles driven into the silt, and many of the oak pilings survived in a perfect state of preservation, as did leather sandals, pieces of bronze and brass jewelry, iron tools, and a small, sparrowlike bird whose feathers had lasted for more than eighteen hundred years. In 1954, construction began on another office block that was to straddle the main channel of the Roman Walbrook, though it was not this that was to earn for Bucklersbury House its slightly cracked niche in the annals of British archaeology. That distinction stemmed from the finding of the remains of a Mithraic temple that had stood on the east bank of the river, a discovery that attracted tremendous popular attention and a cacophony of demands that it be preserved beneath the new building (Fig. 37). Instead, the remains were dug out with jackhammers, converted to a mountain of rubble, and later “reconstructed” as a kind of office workers’ conversation piece in the forecourt of the new block. Promise of this archaeologically worthless compromise successfully muzzled the preservationists, and there were no public champions to call for time for the riverbed itself to be explored and its treasures salvaged—and treasures there were, in such quantities that in one afternoon’s digging I retrieved enough Roman metal objects to fill two hundredweight coal sacks (Fig. 38). They included iron chains, hooks, chisels, lock parts, knives, hinges, goads, and vast quantities of nails from tacks to seven-inch spikes, as well as brass objects that ranged from brooches and pieces of decorative chain to needles, surgical tools, stili (for writing on wax-coated tablets), and coins, all of them from a section of the Walbrook’s east bank about twenty feet long by eight wide.
37. London’s 1955 Nine Day Wonder, the temple of Mithras revealed beneath the basements of buildings destroyed in the blitz. The furor over whether or not the foundations of the Mithraeum should be preserved did much to generate popular interest in British archaeology. The temple, seen from beyond its apsidal west end, measured approximately 60 by 20 feet and was built in the mid-second century A.D.
38. A few of the small brass and bronze items recovered from the bed of the Roman river Walbrook and now in the Museum of London. Among them are brooches, hairpins, a needle, spatula-ended “ear-picks,” surgical or cosmetic tweezers, a small box hinge, chain for linking brooches, and two pendants probably from horse harness. The largest of the pendants is 3½ inches in length. All date from the first or second centuries A.D.
Stunning though the scope, quantity, and state of preservation exhibited by these treasures undoubtedly was, they were but the tip of the iceberg. Had it been possible to excavate properly and study the full length and breadth of the stream that flowed through this city block, there is every reason to believe that we would have learned much more about the life and evolution of Roman London than could have been obtained from the temple ruins even if they had been preserved in their original location. The delays already suffere
d by the builders because of the temple controversy had reduced both their enthusiasm for antiquities and their tolerance for archaeologists to an unprecedented low. Although, as representative for the City’s museum, I was allowed on the site, I was unable to halt the contractors’ work for even a matter of minutes. Only on those occasions when the building program took the crews away from ground yet to be dug out was I able to do any digging of my own, and then I could not extend beyond the lines established for the new foundations. The builders’ point of view was understandable and their restrictions reasonable, even though it meant leaving behind countless marvelous Roman objects that lay half in and half out of the forbidden banks. Unfortunately the rules of the game were not understood or adhered to by private collectors who invaded the site after working hours and dug through the night by the aid of flashlights, burrowing into the banks in pursuit of artifacts so easily come by that it was like prying fruit from a cake. In the morning the once smoothly vertical sides of the foundation holes looked as though they had been attacked by armies of groundhogs. After two or three nights of this, and in spite of my protestations that the museum staff had no part in and did not condone the vandalism, we were barred from the site. Thenceforth, the builders went about their business, destroying the riverbed and its timber-revetted banks without so much as a photographic record being kept (Fig. 39). The silt was scooped out by mechanical draglines and dropped into waiting trucks, which, I was told, hauled it to barges on the Thames and which in turn carried it downriver to be dumped in the North Sea. There were to be no second chances like those Roach Smith had enjoyed a hundred years before. For two weeks the trucks rolled out through the gates, their backs piled high with the black silt and bristling with the splintered fragments of Roman oak piles.
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