Time Team S09-E01 Vauxhall,.London
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 เม.ย. 2013
- On the foreshore of the river Thames, just opposite the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall, London, some old timbers - a series of posts or piles driven into the riverbed - have been discovered peeping out of the water at low tide.
Two Bronze Age spearheads, each around 3000 years old, have also been found thrust hard into the foreshore nearby. Could these timbers be the remains of London's first bridge or the supports of a platform where Bronze-Age people made offerings to the river gods?
As usual, Time Team has just three days to find out.
Any self respecting Time Team fan who's spent the last 1-2 decades scouring the Net for TT offerings needs to know about your efforts, REIJER ZAAJER.
We are now left with a grubby "official" selection of episodes totally ruined by grossly excessive commercials. Personally I have enjoyed and appreciated your contribution for years, and for keeping the TT enthusiasm going, the spivs raking it in today owe you!
Here here !
I would have thought that if there were any man who could succeed where Cnut had failed, it was Phil Harding. He'd stand there and holler, "I'm not done with me trench yet!" and the tide would just flee in terror.
P
he'd shout "Oooh, aargh"
That’s hilarious ! 😂
😂😂🤠
Stone the crows
Thanks so much for posting these. I just discovered Time Team and have been happily binging.
Vauxhall is an amazing part of the Thames foreshore . I went there some years ago with an Italian lady mudlarker . She found a Mesolitic or Neolithic flint core . But I picked up a complete and pristine flint knife , it's one of my best collection items but also the very oldest, thousands of years old . So stone age man no doubt sat on the foreshore near the small rivers on slightly higher ground , chipping away at his Flints to make tools . Interesting that thousands of years ago that there may have once been a small island crossing of some type there . Now that the Thames is channeled and so much faster flowing , most of that old landscape has been washed away , esp what's inside the river section itself .
Or it was washed in from almost anywhere. They did an early episode about this.
I went there because in the Jack Aubrey stories (O'Brian) & other histor. novels, characters visit Vauxhall Gardens. Alas, v. little left. A plaque somewhere I believe, and some paintings, perhaps on hoardings.
The world needs more Micks.
❤❤❤
Always listen to Stewart. His ability to read and find what used to be a part of the landscape is awesome. I'm also fascinated by the environmental archeology.
... I love the computerized reconstructions. Just to get a glimpse of how it was.
@Florian 2 True that, esp later episodes...
And tbh, I think a lot of his "successes" came in early seasons, with no Geophysics to correct him.
I think Mick and others gave him the benefit of the doubt in early episodes with nothing other than his fervent opinion to go on.
In the later episodes, he gets proven wrong a lot by John and the Geophys Team.
@@gentlemanfarmer6042 I wonder though, he was doing the same thing in the early eps. Could be there's more to find and they're both right.
@@karmicpopcorn6440 Following me around on TH-cam, just to comment on my comments....
If i didn't know any better, I'd think you like me. Awe shucks.
Just like in the last comment, go back and read what I posted. Just like in The last post, on the other comment of mine. You like to add a lot of your "thoughts" and "opinions", while talking about mine.
Which is a tad disengenous....
Read what I said,...
The only reason he can't be proven wrong indefinitely in the earlier episodes because of how young geophys was. The science was in its infancy when Mick formed TT, and you basically got to see the whole field, grow and advance before your eyes on the 20 years of it being on the air.
In the later episodes, he get proven wrong more because his niche was always, the obscure opinion in the bunch, and evry dog has his day. The geophys was so good on the later seasons tho, that they could cut thru a lot of his "interprations", test them without having to ever dig.
Again, pretty straightforward.....
@@gentlemanfarmer6042 lol now I get it. Apparently my binge watching is coinciding with yours. Again, I'm enjoying discussion and putting my thoughts in. If there's a good way to reply without your name and without accidentally posting on the main page where it will be out of context, please let me know. Don't much care to read dissertations. Just stating what I see and how I see it. It's called conversation. I usually enjoy it. I'll be sure not to post on any comments of yours in the future now that I'm actually paying attention to your name.
@@karmicpopcorn6440 A flare for the dramatic, much? .....lol.
Settle down govner, Im just stating how I saw it myself, no need to become a martyr for words.
PM me.
Now imagine several thousands of years from now some archeologists dig up their piece of wood along with the others and just think "my god... why is this ONE piece of wood so much younger than the rest??"
And what's this "Time Team" medallion? Was this "Time Team" some sort of religious sect?
Or a group of UFO believers awaiting an alien fly-by to whisk them away from this spot?
We only have three days to find out.
I dont know how many episodes you watch, but archaeologists put in a lot of thought as to whether there has been contamination of sites by later depositions.
Thanks for posting
When I see a photo of Battersea Power Station all I think of is the classic Pink Floyd Animals album...Pigs on the Wing.
I can't help the association. It's become such a pop icon.
For me it reminds me of The Quatermass Experiment.
Seeing these episodes shows us also just how much red tape nonsense they have to deal with. A boat offshore at all times, having to put the silt back exactly where they found it even including a bit of wood that matches the size of the bit removed..
One of the things that is rarely discussed on Time Team is sea level rise. As the glaciers melted the water goes into the oceans and sea level rises. In addition the weight of the glaciers on the northern part of the British Isles sank them deeper into the mantle on which they ‘float’. When the glaciers retreated that part of the small tectonic plate rebounded and the northern part rose up higher while the southern part tipped down deeper making sa level rise more rapid. The Thames estuary is a ‘drowned’ estuary. The original Thames ran through a much narrower river bed with steeper sides. That added to the normal movement of rivers as they meander to the sea makes this site look much wetter, much wider with swampier banks. Climate change just accelerates this effect.
Time and tide wait for no man. Not even the Time Team. 😊😊
Love from the old lady in Texas may God bless you always
This Dutchman wonders why they did not just build a temporary dam first and then pump a few square meters dry.
They try that in a different episode and it's a massive failure.
@@petertaylor4980 guess they did not hire any Dutch folk back then :p but it would be pretty hard to do in 3 days, can you remember what eps it was?
@@mondriaa, I don't. My recollection is that they were excavating a boat in a river, but the Wikipedia episode descriptions are insufficient to track it down.
@@petertaylor4980 aah to bad, thanks for the trouble. Alice Roberts did a show I think it was called extreme archeology where she dug in a tidle river trying to get to a wooden post
"it's ritual" -Francis Pryor, any episode that includes him.
A lot of human activity is ritual if you think about it, for instance, people gathering and listening to wise elders telling stories about the ancestors, or archaeologists producing time team
Francis is misunderstood here. Civil construction and religious (or spiritually driven construction) were one and the same. He is talking about a time in which "superstition" was a meaningless word.
32.05 if there is no rainbow sweater, there will be rainbow umbrella :D
had a thought watching the part where they put the log they did back in, when he said will it still be there in 3000 years, will people in 3000 years know about time team and still be able to see it. crazy to think people then might be able to actually see someone that was alive thousands of years before. really enjoying going through these videos again, must be the 5th time.
Mike: "So I could have got up later!"
Gus: "You could have had a double breakfast" 🤣🤣🤣
15:00
Heh, "Post excavation" still has me chuckling every time I watch this episode
@@simpsonmark It's the archaeological equivalent of a dad joke. Post-excavation work is archaeological work that's done after an excavation, including analysis, conservation, cataloguing and publication - the less glamorous side of archaeology, which my professor used to call "an exercise in extreme bookkeeping".
"He placed the Bronze Arrowheads in the river as an offering to the gods..." More likely he dropped the arrowheads into the river, couldn't find them and spent the rest of the day cursing the gods...
Am I the only that thinks it's hilarious when Tony kind of jumps off screen at the end of his intro before the theme music starts playing?
Such a fun show !
Tragically, the Thames has long been a massive sewer.
Ah - the first sighting of Henry at 16:42. He's such a nice guy; great gps surveyor - not that Bernard isn't/wasn't.
Ohhh arrre Tony bronze age.... Stone the crows!
Ooh arrrrrrrrrr
Soo kool...thx for sharing these
I bet they wish they could put up a ring of sandbags or some kind of wall to keep the water out of their trenches.
They try to reconstruct a rickety old wooden pile-driver while a jet powered aeroplane with fly by wire, computerised flight control systems, satellite navigation and radar flies overhead. Not bad progress for a few thousand short years,
16:30..love how they seem to spend so many of their precious minutes discussing how many minutes they're likely to have
I have recently been watching some individuals who are permitted to "Mudlark" on the fore shore of the Thames (you need permission from I think it's from London Port Authority). They find lots of interesting things (lots of little tobacco pipes from the 15th and 16th century; coins; buckles; small pieces of chain mail; straight pins musket balls, cannon ball, etc. >> ). When they find something extraordinary, that maybe so old that they can't guess (a few Roman coins, a leather sandal, a portion of a possible sword , Many of the 'Mudlarkers' turn the item over to The London Museum for more information).
Because I have been watching Time Team I will sometimes cringe when they remove something obviously old, but because of the tidal flow, it's not done in a archeological manner (no info as to where it was located in relation to other finds). Of course they have that narrow window of time (2hrs .. maybe) when the tides go out and flow back in, so they can't do an in depth in-situ evaluation
First appearance of surveyor Henry Chapman, replacing Bernard Thomason. Henry was made a much more visible member over the years.
If they had had more time they could have built a coffer dam around the site, and excavated to their hearts' content.
They wasn't allowed as it would effect the environment in that area.
What would it do, bother the river rats?
I would have thought a coffer dam giving more time to dig would also allow more time to refill the trench properly
Greg B
"What would it do, bother the river rats?" Not too bright are you.
With all the bloody modern building right up to the river's edge, it seems a llittle late to nit-pick.
Anthropologists ask regularly: when is a bowl just a bowl?
This looks like a very practical 'bowl' - a remarkably engineered prehistoric bridge across the Thames.
Brilliant
Putting in large gateposts, several times I have dug the surface off, to find clay under shingle, gravels, then driven them in. Wood can bind or shatter if driven through shale.
Perhaps the broken pottery and broken knives were not "offerings" but just trash tossed into the water?
the shopping trolley was an "offering" too
Those spear heads aren't broken though. There had to be be a significant reason for putting them into the water.
@@MontyCantsin5 The spear heads weren't broken as you said but the "spears" were, so they still qualify for the "broken ritual" as stated.
@@ThePhoenix074: If the spear heads did have a wooden handle put into the sockets (almost impossible to know) and this was removed, or broken off, before they were put into the water then yes, they do qualify as part of a ritual involving defacing/ deliberately making the object unusable (similar to what is sometimes seen with sword blades being bent before putting into springs, etc). I think there is evidence for perfectly complete metal objects being put into wet places as offerings too though. Both types of ritual activity probably existed.
I still don't agree with the OP that complete spears were just tossed away as 'trash'.
@@MontyCantsin5 In a time when spears were very much needed for self defense and the most prominent weapon too finding a couple with broken shafts at an important location such as a river crossing wouldn't exactly be remarkable. The stone and bronze age wasn't puppies and flowers, it was brutal and dangerous. You would expect to find damaged weapons at bridges just like you would expect to find trash tossed into the water, dropped coins, drowning victims or combatants, and all sorts of other things that has absolutely nothing to do with religious ceremony. Francis is jumping to the conclusion of ceremony when there is no evidence for it, 2 spears heads does not make a ceremony... it is two spearheads found by a bridge and nobody knows why because there are hundreds of other possible reasons.
Had to laugh at the life jackets. Bloody health and safety.
Fool.
I am amazed at all the people it takes to study one post. The expense for the 3 days must run onto the 100's of thousands!
The regular Time Team people, like Mick, are volunteers. I assume that they are using established labs which are already funded, including the salaried employees, if indeed they also are not volunteers. Archaoloigists love their work and are paid during the week. Of course Tony is paid and so are the camera people.
I do like how civil everybody is. I went up north in the US to school. Orange Man would seem like a gentleman there.
Oh shut up
When I first saw this episode, my thought was "Frances, haven't you ever done something stupid in youth? Maybe with something that was your dads?" My thought was two boys went out spear hunting on a dock and both went after the same thing, loosing dad's prized spear heads in the water after they broke off.
Not saying that's what happened, but just my thought.
Yes, maybe the ancestors are having a good laugh right about now! :-)
No, no. If Francis says it's ceremonial and religious and all that. then it is. At least, according to himself.. But then again, it always is ceremonial and religious with Francis.... It's all he thinks he knows...
@@Exiledkthe
Yes, I dont think you need go for the "ritual" explanation everytime. I think our ancestors were less mystical and more practical than some archeologists think. :)
And that's why your a world renowned archeologist, with an expertise in Bronze Age Societies in Britian....
Oh wait, that's Francis Pryor.
Smh...lol.
Whatever you ask Francis, it is always an offering
Unless there's undeniable evidence to the contrary, it's ritual lol.
Darn. I was hoping to learn more about the 18th century pleasure gardens in Vauxhall.
In that respect, Vauxhall was the first place Russians officially saw a railway. As they took the station plate for the thing itself, the Russian word for "railway station" is "Vauxhall", if in different spelling.
If this piece of wood could talk...
At 10:10 when the water vehicle (sorry not sure what it is called) brought to mind a childhood movie "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang"
In the Texas my home. I am one of the people that hope to spend a few months on the water ways. The Highway Dept. Has a Adopt a Highway Program. A roadside sign stating that Boy Scouts Troup 1111 or a local High School or Organization Lions Club ect... Is responsible for the next mile stretch of the road. They promise to walk the area in proper safety gear and proper supervision if Minors are involved. Or they fund the cost of trash pick up. Saving a good bit of Funds. Local Jails should provide inmates to good use where possible. Or if u can work off a fine by doing Community Service. Here our non-profits gets labor from the courts. A list of approved places to pick from to put in your hours.
They actually look like guidons on a ceremonial post.
I worked on the London eye we were warned about Weils Disease.
omg...what a dump on the side of that river! Is it like that all the time?
Time Team meets Mud Men :)
Anyone know if the T. T. Replacement post is still in place? Wonder how long that medallion stayed before it was nicked :)
I bet that it was a bridge too.
No one cares.
Is it just me or was anybody else confused @ 29:30, when they were using "period" tools to recreate the wooden post with what appears to be modern steel adze heads? Original speculation was this might be a stone age site and then concluded bronze age, but iron, let alone steel was not in use that early. Please feel free to correct me if you think those adze heads are actually bronze instead or otherwise period correct.
Probably a dock for fishing or boats.
And scoring puss
10:10 Those “duckboat “ vehicles have been responsible for So many deaths.
@janis vogel It's not the "ignorant English tourists" driving them though, is it...?
With a bit of organisation, they could have got some mechanical muscle, in the form of a mini digger, and things could have progressed much faster.
Of all the remote dig sites they do, and they lose power in the heart of London.
Maybe a Bridge Maybe.
Ahh, so thats how the new St George Wharf pier came about... They built it right over the old one... the very old one!
Has anyone been to see if the replacement Time Team post is still on the riverbank?
That would make a good video for the mudlarkers with TH-cam channels
From the title, I thought they were looking for a cheaply made car.
Bryon Lape I laughed at your comment. Right on the mark
Celto Loco or even worse YUGO...YIKES!!!
Celto Loco Anyone who had the misfortune of owning still tries to forget as well.
Leopararouen
or 'wego maybe' LOL
Years ago a friend foolishly took out a lease for a Yugo. The car was the worst POS around. Notice I didn't say worst POS on "the road" as that car had major dependability issues. It wouldn't start if it was raining, it wouldn't run in the summer and in the winter just forget it period. No wonder Yugoslavia collapsed...
My interpretation is that the spearheads were typical bronze age baby seal removal tools.
33:39 So he's saying the Stone Age toolmakers were more highly skilled craftsman than the Bronze Age ones were thousands of years later. Fascinating.
Just that they were better flintknappers. Their descendants surely did other activities with more skill.
If they had access to metals, then they didn't need elaborate flinted tool. They weren't "hip" enough.
In fairness, you probably couldn't knap a flint as well as the Bronze Age people. I'm quite sure I couldn't.
My first thought. Where is the flying pig?
They should have done underwater archaeology
Coffer dams with a passage in the middle.or from only one side
3 days 1 post sounds like council work
😂
Tony, There is NO such thing as a "Race against time". Your excellent program can easily be segmented over more than three days. [Aussie in BC]
who are you talking to ,fool? This is some scumbag pirate who's ripping Time team off, not official site. Didn't you work that out?
@@Jenalgo Who's the fool here? You keep calling people fools in this thread and yet in this particular case you've completely misread or misunderstood what Bruce B said. Geez. Wierdo
*Bruce Blake*
1. Tides don't stop for archæology.
2. The archæologists could only afford three days away from their regular jobs, also in archæology. Three days is quite usual for an exploratory dig like this if good archæologists do it.
3 days is necessary to add a little drama and tension for television. There are plenty of boring, 5 days a week archeological digs going on right now if you’d prefer.
Was here Nov 2019
Disappointing. First thought was - why not dam the site (even if coffering was out, what about sandbags), second thought was why not sound the river, or find the fireman who in Season 2 episode 4 (Lambeth) told them where the sandbars are in the river? Third was, what on earth did the team besides the soil corers and Stewart do all day since they couldn't dig?
This programme is not typical of their investigations. Also - there's a lot of other stuff in archaeology that can be done when excavation is prevented or interfered with: not all archaeology is done in a trench or a test pit.
A post hole digger would have made removal about ten times easier and faster I have dug holes almost that size in under thirty minutes with several breaks not several hours with a team of people who could have worked in shifts.
*bookwizards*
How much archæology would you have lost?
Why they didn't use cofferdams?!? It should have been way easier to dig the site...
When Stewart starts talking with his huge hands, everybody better duck! 🖐🏼👉🏼✌🏼✋🏼🤏🏼👆🏼 haha
I used to play there back in 1964 when I was a kid load of mud dead rats old bottles old shoes basically a lot of crap
23:52 Is he really wearing an inflatable life vest????? LOL
A little over the top to say the least.
Oh Francis with his ritual. I’m not religious but I certainly do rituals in my life religious or not. Just passed down. He’s not wrong, I just think he puts too much into it. He goes ritual as first though, but it was probably ritual as a afterthought
I thought there was something called a caisson, a sort of diving bell you could work in. Problem with breathing compressed air, but up to 30 feet that would be no issue. With a caisson, an air compressor, a pump, and an airlock, you could dig at posts away out there, far beyond a jetty. Might be expensive, though.
I wonder if they could run the carbon-dating on THAT (40:20) xDDD
Pretty sure its a landing strip for aliens.
46:21 They missed. Had to edit.
Vauxhall and I
it's a ferry
what about a coffer dam to give them time to analyze properly?
19:25 Organic mud is the only mud I'll touch.
As long as it is free-range organic mud.
Coffer dam.
Time and expense.
They were not allowed too. It would disturb the subsoil environment too much.
They certainly know how to make a job difficult!
If the site did not originally have the contents of those bags of gravel, how is dumping said contents restoring the site?
I think at the start they said that the gravel was to go back on top when they were done ??
Perhaps that is a picky detail we are not supposed to notice.
@5:03
Is the graphic designers name Kickass Singh ? hahah Time stamp 16:54 .
I think they put too much into religious articles etc. Things like this would also have been key places to hold and therefore to fight over. Spear heads, broken pottery, bones etc could very well been due to fighting. I don't think people would take something as important and expensive as a spear and just smash it into the river bed as an offering to their departed family. Burial with your own blade etc is one thing but to throw away your means for obtaining food and protection is another. You must remember that people were existing very much hand to mouth during those times.
They were meant to be extreme sacrifices. If you wanted a big favor from the gods you had to be willing to make big sacrifices. Something of value, a spear, favored piece of jewelry, often broken to show how serious you were. People still do this today, in a way. How many times do you hear of people (or have you) saying things like "just get me out of this jam and I'll never do xyz again" or "just make my loved one okay and I'll give xyz to charity"? It's the same thing.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case all of the time, or even here, just that was how they thought and felt back then.
Ah come on Tony, why 3 days? Give it a month.
And who would _pay?_
Because they all had jobs and careers that they did not want to throw away. Unless you are independently wealthy, a job is a necessity you can not afford to neglect.
Underwater archaeology, forget the tides! Suck out the debris and scan the bottom and flow waste.
+John Lord I am an underwater archaeologist and no. No, you don't use water dredges on a site of this nature and it's too shallow for an airlift. For a water dredge to be useful, the entire timber must be submerged all the time and the dredge hole cannot fill in while the dredge is working - impossible for a site with this stratigraphy and composition. A coffer dam or barrier could be used, but that would take weeks of work to remove the timber, not days. Plus, dredging is powerful stuff - damage to the artifact and site would be assured - and as you saw, it was broken already. A dredge could have torn it apart. I work on 3 partially dry nautical sites regularly and we only work during low water conditions to preserve the wrecks; they would be destroyed by dredging, and we re-bury the site and replace every bit of matrix that we move.
I really wish I could report your comment for being truly brilliant. There's a reason I never went into underwater archaeology (I was pretty much mediaeval onwards)... underwater's just too complicated.
I get a kick out of Francis Pryor who seems to be able to make large leaps of logic without any supporting evidence, least of all proof.
hahahahah i was thinking the same thing lol
S
On the other hand he has decades of experience. Also, he is the one who discovered Flag Fen.
And he usually correct because he knows his subject.
He's giving us the sythesis, based on all his knowledge, experience and the particulars of this site. We don't get the academic presentation, with footnotes, just the essential in a nutshell (probably a hazelnut, surely around in the bronze age)..
N.
tyhgh
Francis prior talks a load of bollocks
I love Phil, but his fingernails creep me out every time I see them.
Nauseating. Every single episode when they do a closeup. Makes me want to vomit.
Look exactly at this frame: 34:05 and 40:46 BARF!
He's a very talented guitar player. The long nails are for fingerpicking. Notice that the long nails are only on his right hand.
test
What lightweights. Just pretend he's gardening or you're listening to him play his guitar. Can't believe that you actually feel ill with seeing dirty hands. Might be something you're not dealing with here...
I find it amusing that they have to deal with "environmental" issues in an area that desperately needs cleaning. The stench alone should indicate that anybody should be allowed to come in and clean this fetid place. Another indication in the UK that the attention required is misplaced.
bnuhferh What can happen is the pollutants are somewhat sealed away under the muck so then they are released if the holes are left open. What is needed is the area sealed off by a cofferdam the polluted soil taken away and processed, very expensive.
+bnuhferh Because you can't just shift pollution around. Where do you take the pollution? Do you clean it? Can you clean it? Does it need to be specially disposed off. If you just pick it up & move it you aren't fixing a pollution problem just moving it.
Not a very deep or logical thinker are you. Or educated.
For everyone's general information, there is also a disease carried by the rats that swarm the waterfront, Weils Disease, that can be very virulent and deadly, from what I recall. It's one of the reasons digging pr even disturbing the soil at the waterfront is so strictly controlled.
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/26/weils-disease-andy-holmes
Environment does not equal pollution. They're worried about controlling erosion on the Thames. You dig holes willy nilly and suddenly you've changed the landscape, no place for waterfowl to nest, so on and so forth.
no time team you cannot re create............. their skills were evolved with work and time and tools at hand. you cannot just jump in and do. your skills are different not better just different.
The cynical church hooghly agree because locket mathematically nod across a combative cub. true, eatable word