|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
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.
Six excavations (1987-2007) at Finsbury Circus on the north side of
the City of London uncovered over 130 Romano-British burials, part
of the upper Walbrook cemetery, to the west of the better-known
`northern' cemetery (around Bishopsgate). Set within an area of
marginal land, traversed by meandering tributary streams of the
Walbrook, the cemetery provides intriguing insights into the
management of burial space and attitudes to the dead, and a
solution to one of the most intriguing problems of London's Roman
archaeology - the origin of the `Walbrook skulls'. The cemetery was
in use by the end of the 1st century AD, with most activity dated
to c AD 120-200, but occasional interments continued into the 4th
century AD. The majority of the graves are typical of the
cemeteries of Roman London, but two individuals buried with heavy
iron leg rings, apparently forged around the ankles after death are
of special interest. What is remarkable about this cemetery is that
human remains, particularly skulls, became exposed, were washed out
and transported downstream by floods, migrating Walbrook
tributaries and drainage channels. That burial continued in such
conditions suggests either that this watershed area (and the
taphonomic transformations on display) held significance for those
using the cemetery, or that their choice of burial location was
restricted.
St Marylebone parish grew from humble beginnings on the city's
margins to become, in the 18th and 19th centuries, one of the
wealthiest in London, home to the elite and fashionable. The small
parish church on Marylebone High Street, built in brick in 1742 on
the site of the medieval church, was inadequate for such a
congregation and was superceded in 1817 by today's far grander
edifice on Marylebone Road. Archaeological investigations in 1992
showed that the graveyard - levelled in the 1930s for a playground
for St Marylebone Church of England School for Girls - lay
substantially undisturbed beneath the playground. In 2004 plans to
build an underground sports hall allowed excavation of a sample of
the burial ground and part of the church itself. Most of the 350+
burials recorded were from the graveyard; some were in family
vaults and others inside the church crypt. The archaeological
results and detailed osteological analysis of 301 individuals are
combined with documentary research into the parish and its
population, including the woman who preferred parrots to men, the
artist who died of lockjaw and the Reverend headmaster and his
'most wicked and abandoned wife'. This volume is one of the largest
and most comprehensive studies of a post-medieval London cemetery.
|
|