The River Thames in England has gained a reputation as a watery burial ground, and with good reason. Over the past 200 years skeletal remains have been dredged up from its bottom in significant quantities, and that is in addition to the bodies that have been fished out of the water as suicides, murder victims or accidental drownings.
Researchers have known that some of the bones recovered from the bottom date relatively far back in history. But they haven’t really known just how far back until now. A new study has revealed the surprising truth, which is that a good percentage of the older bones date back to the Bronze Age (2,500—800 BC) and Iron Age (800—43 AD), actually predating the founding of London by the Romans in the first century.
Old Bones with Mysterious Origin Stories
In a recently published article in Antiquity, a team of experts affiliated with the Natural History Museum and Historic England in London provide details of their analysis of bones taken from 30 skeletons that have been rescued from the Thames, dredged up from its depths to tell stories about ancient times. These experts performed radiocarbon dating tests on the bones to find out when they had lived and died, but also with the ultimate purpose of finding out how they had died and why they had ended up in such an unusual place.
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"Most people — including Londoners! — are quite taken aback to hear that hundreds of human bones have come from the River Thames," study lead author Nichola Arthur, a curator at the Natural History Museum in London, told Live Science. Human skeletons "have been encountered fairly regularly in the water places of northwest Europe," Arthur noted, but "the Thames human bones represent a uniquely large assemblage.”
Ruins of an Iron Age village in Britain known as Bodrifty. (Rod Allday/CC BY-SA 2.0).
One would assume this has something to do with the fact that London was built next to the river. But in fact most of the bones were recovered in the upstream zones of the river, found inland relatively close to its source in Gloucestershire (the River Thames is 215 miles or 346 kilometers long).
Researchers have actually been studying skeletons retrieved from the depths of the river since the 19th century, searching for clues to explain their presence. One early theory about these discoveries was that the corpses came from a fierce battle between the Celts and the Romans, which would mean the bones were in the neighborhood of 2,000 years old. However, researchers eventually became skeptical of this hypothesis, given the absence of proof, and developed a different theory, namely that the bodies in the river had come from a range of time periods and had ended up there as a result of erosion of riverbank burials or because they’d simply fallen in and drowned.
"The big question for these human bones is how they came to be in the river," Arthur acknowledged. Its a hard question to answer, but the first step in this new study involved the collection of radiocarbon dating data, to determine when the bodies actually found their way into the Thames.
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The researchers had some preexisting data to work with, as dates had already been taken from 31 skeletons found in the river by other researchers. When they emerged those results with their own, obtained from 30 freshly dated samples, they found that the Thames skeletons were people who had lived between 4,000 BC and 1800 AD, a time frame of nearly 6,000 years. Notably, however, the majority were older, having lived during the Bronze and Iron Ages.
Ruins of a British Bronze Age settlement, dating back to 2,200 BC. (Anne Burgess/Geograph Britain and Ireland/CC BY-SA 2.0).
"We can now say with confidence that these don't appear to just be bones that have steadily accumulated in the river through time," Arthur said. "There really was something significant going on in the Bronze and Iron Ages."
What is the Explanation?
Now, the big challenge is trying to figure out what that “something significant” might have been. Whatever it was, Arthur believes it was not a phenomenon that applied only to England, but to northwestern Europe in general. She is considering the possibility that prehistoric peoples were depositing bodies in watery graves in connection with rituals rooted in ancient religions, or for other reasons related to spiritual beliefs and concerns.
As she would admit, however, this is just a theory at this point, with little in the way of direct evidence to test its validity.
"This research has moved the arguments along, but the funerary origin of these remains is yet to be completely studied and demonstrated," stated Chris Knüsel, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Bordeaux in France, in an interview with Live Science.
The River Thames and the skyline of London at sunset. (David Iliff/CC BY-SA 3.0).
Knüsel, who has also studied the Thames remains but was not involved in the new study, favors a different explanation for the tendency of the river to collect the dead. He thinks that the river has provoked a lot of violence over the century, leading to warfare near its banks as people fought for access to this vitally important waterway.
"Violence is a particularly common theme for later prehistoric human remains from watery places,” Arthur acknowledged, before noting that "we have found patterns of skeletal trauma on the bones of the Thames human remains."
The next step in this research will involve a more extensive study of the injuries on the bones, to determine their nature and severity.
"Exploring exactly how the Thames human remains might fit into [prehistoric] practices is one of the next exciting steps of the project," Arthur said.
Top image: A quieter upstream section of the River Thames, at Whitchurch-on-Thames.
Source: Peter Trimming/Geography Britain and Ireland/CC BY-SA 2.0.
By Nathan Falde
