Anti-plague amulets and IOUs: the excavation that brings Roman London thundering back to life

The Guardian

18-03-2025

Archaeologists don't always get lucky when a site is redeveloped in the middle of London. People have been building in the city for millennia and, in more recent times, bombing it. But if the building before went too deep, or there has been too much exposure to the air by bomb damage in the past, there won't be much to find. Things were especially bad before 1991, when there was no planning protection for anything but scheduled ancient monuments. 'We used to have to beg to get on site,' says Sophie Jackson, archaeologist at the London Museum.
It's not that developers are insensitive, says Jackson: 'When we did the excavation at Barts hospital, [it] was functioning above us – we were right under the MRI machines. Developers recognise the social value.' It's just that the stars don't often align.
But when Bloomberg, the financial media company, acquired the Bank junction site in 2010, the stars were aligned. Before this excavation, I'm afraid, I conformed to the gender stereotype and rarely thought about the Roman empire. Since I saw the London Museum's new, unparalleled, internationally seismic collection, I have thought of little else. A total of 14,000 objects, 81,000 fragments of animal bones and 73,000 shards of pottery were recovered from this single site – the largest acquisition the museum has ever had from one place. They will be on display from 2026 at what used to be the site of Smithfield meat market.
Geography mattered on the Bloomberg site in the heart of the City, close to the Bank of England. The Walbrook, a lost river of London, had carved a deep valley into the landscape and the Romans constantly tried to reclaim the banks as the city grew and prospered. They did this by packing the ground with rubbish, building on it, then packing it again, three more times, so there is a stratigraphical layer cake of Roman trash going almost all the way back to London's creation, in AD47 or 48. The river also waterlogged the ground, protecting the material from oxygen: leather, brooches, shoes, writing tablets, wood, animal bones and ceramics were all phenomenally well preserved. There are sandals that look fresher than last year's Birkenstocks.
Site B2Y10 – to give it its academic name – was previously occupied by Legal and General, which dug deep in the 1950s, to create the biggest post-blitz rebuild in the City. Excavating archaeologists found the third-century Temple of Mithras, and oral histories from Londoners who witnessed the find in 1954 recall a magical atmosphere, when the secrets of the ancient past met the regeneration of the postwar present to create a sense of enormous hope and renewal. People queued for hours to see the temple. One woman who was pregnant at the time called her baby Mithra. As significant as that archaeological yield was, it was pretty haphazard – workers on the site were just picking things up and handing them in.
The Legal and General building had huge double basements, except on one side, where they had had to stay shallow for fear of jeopardising a Christopher Wren church on the opposite corner. 'We were so excited by that single basement,' Jackson says. 'We knew that in the layer underneath, that they hadn't dug into, a lot of material would have survived.' Across 150 years of previous Roman recoveries in London, 19 writing tablets were found in total. In this one find, there were 500, of which 80 have already been deciphered. These are wooden frames, with an inset writing area about 'the size of a Ryvita', which would be filled with black wax, then written on.
The wax has long degraded, but you might get lucky with a heavy-handed scribe and be able to read the indented text on the wood beneath. Or it might be a palimpsest, an original script overwritten at a later date, and you'll see fragments of numerous messages, obscuring each other. The first tablet they read, dated 8 January AD57, was a financial document – an IOU. 'They were amazing bureaucrats, the Romans,' Jackson says. 'And it's nice for Bloomberg, isn't it?'
The team managed to recover the names of 100 Roman Londoners we had never heard of. 'One tablet says, 'Take this to someone's house, it's by the house of Catalus.' It really struck me. These people had their city, as much as we have it as our city,' Jackson says. 'There's a really gossipy one,' says curator Meriel Jeater, 'a bloke who's writing to someone called Titus: 'Everybody's talking about you in the market, saying you've lent them money. You've done a really bad deal; you shouldn't appear shabby.''
Alan Pipe, the museum's animal bones specialist, shows me some skeletal remains on which 'every tool mark, every nick made by a butcher's knife' is visible. He could almost recreate a day in the life – or certainly the meals – of a Roman Londoner. Many of the bones are from cows, pigs and sheep; there are others from chickens but fewer. Chickens only appeared in the UK during the iron age, and were not regularly consumed until the third century. Hares and other game, as well as fish, give us an overall picture of the diet.
You can gauge the skeletal age of the beasts from scores of amazingly preserved mandibles (lower jaws) and how worn the biting surfaces of the teeth are, Pipe explains. If a pig died at a year old, you can infer an amount of animal husbandry and agriculture. He shows me chunks of bone resultant from 'splitting and smashing, way beyond what's necessary for butchery'. This was probably for boiling and grease extraction.
You can also cross-reference these bones with other items found in the same layer, and archaeologically date the whole lot with associated finds – with ceramics in particular, as the techniques and ingredients evolved quite quickly and distinctively. You can pinpoint an era more precisely from a shard, sometimes, than from a coin, which may still have been in use 40 years after it was minted. Dendrochronology (dating by analysing tree trunk rings) is better still because trees would have been built into a building, so you can pinpoint it to the year. Sure, if some helpful Roman wrote the actual date on to a tablet, that works as well.
The museum's senior finds specialist, Michael Marshall, has 750 pairs of Roman shoes believed to date from the second half of the first century AD. The Claudian invasion (that is, the main Roman invasion in AD43, led by Claudius) brought new Mediterranean styles and materials, such as a dainty flip-flop – the adults' hobnailed, the children's not. You can see evidence of a big military presence – the paraphernalia of war, the ceramic leftovers of those catering to thirsty soldiers.
There is plenty of evidence of people living very comfortable, good lives in the centre of London in AD50: the shoes are finely made, and there are gradations of material and craft in the pottery, which suggests some people were already considerably wealthier than others. There are a number of face pots (domestic pots with facial features carved into or applied on to them), for example, some of which are very crude, others exquisitely detailed. One depicts a woman with complicated hair and is thought to represent a maenad, a female follower of Bacchus, god of wine, who were associated with divine frenzy. There are a lot of snakes on the ceramics, representing agriculture, hope, rebirth and fertility, and also suggesting cultural cross-pollination with the European continent and people moving between one place and another – almost as if they had invented freedom of movement by the first century AD. There was also slavery – there are shackles in the find, too.
Then there are anomalies that tell us something about the limits of Roman understanding. Jackson shows me a black, pebble-like object with three indentations on it, in which someone has tried to make a hole, to turn it into a pendant. Finding the material unnaturally unyielding, the Romans decided these were 'solidified thunderbolts', she says. 'It's so interesting to think of Romans doing archaeology themselves.' Not very well, mind; it wasn't a solidified thunderbolt, it was a neolithic hand-axe made of obsidian.
It's a reminder that we modern humans are also capable of misreading the signs. In the 1954 excavation, for example, they found beads that were assumed to have been worn by a woman, but here, those same beads and amulets were found still on their original strings, alongside other material that indicates they were worn by a horse. 'It might have been a lady horse,' Marshall allows. Horses wore amulets covered in sexual imagery – such as fist-and-phallus amulets, with a clenched fist gesture at one end and an unmetaphorical phallus at the other, which was thought to ward off the evil eye. Children also wore amulets to ward off plague.
As Jackson says, these people had their London as much as we have ours. A trove this size, when it goes on display next year, offers not so much a glimpse of the past as an immersion into it. It's like falling head-first into the first century – in so much detail you can almost smell it.