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No.54 - January 2003 | Contex HOME LECTURE REPORT London
before London What does pre-history mean to you? Raquel Welch in a furry bikini? Dinosaurs? Cavemen with clubs dragging their knuckles along the ground? The Museum of London opened its new Pre-history gallery " London before London " on the day of COLAS’s October and Jon Cotton, the man charged with responsibility for the new exhibition, took time off from a busy schedule of interviews, receptions and publicity to take us through the gallery’s own evolutionary stages from a corridor exhibition to the splendid new gallery of today. Jon promised us "three galleries for the price of one" and we certainly got our money’s worth. When the Museum first opened in the 1970’s London’s prehistory had a very low profile, lack of funding and low expectations meant that prehistory was very much sidelined in favour of the more well documented London of the Romans, of Shakespeare and Pepys and the London of today – the 24 hour financial hub. The first real change came in 1994 when the prehistory gallery was remodeled; the new display adopted a very different, more people-centred approach. It displayed more of the beautiful objects like flint hand axes which the museum holds in its collection. It was about this time that the museum asked the visiting public the question above. 30 % answered "Dinosaurs". The museum has none and this preconception was not challenged anywhere by the displays. However since the museum first opened there have been huge steps forward in our knowledge. Large-scale excavations such as the building of new terminals at Heathrow Airport and regeneration works around London have yielded vast quantities of new material and a better understanding of the way our ancestors had used the area. We now have evidence of occupation from the early hunter-gatherers to whole bronze–age field systems. The landscape was continually in use and continually evolving and the new gallery aims to tell that story. Since the 1994 face-lift our knowledge has continued to increase and it was under the direction of the Museum's dynamic director Simon Thurley that the new gallery was planned. Simon realized that to start the London story with the Roman founding of Londinium was to ignore a huge part of London’s history. The emphasis of the new display is on "The power of place and people". People have been using the area around the Thames for thousands of years and the new exhibition recognizes the importance of the river, without the Thames there would be no London. It has been a source of natural resources, a highway and the focus of religious offerings. The Thames has been yielding up its secrets, the Thames Archaeological Survey has uncovered many features, including a sequence of drowned forests at Erith of Neolithic and Bronze Age date. Since dredging the Thames began we have been recovering a wealth of beautiful metal objects including swords and daggers. It is the focal point of life in the area still creating a north / south divide and "a river wall snakes through the new exhibition." Just as important are the people who inhabited the prehistoric landscape and the designers have attempted to change people’s preconceptions that prehistory was populated by club wielding Neanderthals, Celts or Druids. Jon showed a slide of a piece of prehistoric 'Mortlake ware' pottery dredged from the Thames around 1914, that had a distinctive decoration of small pits, when a plaster cast was made of one of the pits a perfect fingertip was revealed and suddenly there was a real person before us, just as there was when The Iceman was discovered high in the Alps frozen where he fell with all his equipment and belongings beside him. Ordinary people living ordinary domestic lives. There have been few prehistoric burials discovered in the area but one "the Shepperton Lady" is featured in the gallery, Jon tantalized us by showing us a Julian Richards style reconstruction in progress but not the finished face. To see the finished product we must visit the new gallery and I am sure that all of us would wish to do so as soon as possible. |
