Dig this: Crossrail's ancient buried treasure

Stuart necklace

Date 17th century

Found Liverpool Street

Found on the body of a young child. It’s unusual because in the Christian tradition you don’t bury people with grave goods. It’s made of 20 beads of pottery, bone, glass and amber, so it’s not an inexpensive item and would have been an unusual purchase.

Victorian jars

Date 19th century

Found Charing Cross

Crosse & Blackwell used to have a factory on Charing Cross Road. When it changed from producing ceramic pottery jars to glass ones, 8,000 leftovers, like these, were buried in the cellar.

Stuart cooking pot

Date 17th century

Found Farringdon

This was a standard cooking pot for use on an open fire. It was probably made in potteries on the Surrey-Hampshire borders.

Roman horseshoe

Date 2nd or 3rd century AD

Found Liverpool Street

A temporary horseshoe or ‘hipposandal’ that would have been lashed to the hoof. We found these in the cart ruts on the embankment that led up to what must have been a bridge over the now ‘lost’ Walbrook stream. These were found in situ rather than in rubbish dumps, so you can imagine a Roman carter trying to get his horse up the embankment and losing the shoes in the sticky mud.

Stone age flints

Date Middle Stone Age, 9,000 years ago

Found North Woolwich

After the end of the Ice Age the ice sheets started to retreat, but the geography of London was very different. Instead of one big river, a whole network of streams meandered through a flood plain with small gravel islands. We found these flints on the edge of one. It looks like someone was hunting in the area and took a look at the flint cobbles from the river to see if any could be turned into tools. There’s an array of very small blades and an ice blade about two inches long.

Venetian gold coin

Date 1501-21

Found Liverpool Street

This fairly rare find is in very good condition, so someone had taken it out of circulation and used it as a pendant, before losing it in a rubbish dump. It can be accurately dated because it has the name of Venetian Doge Leonardo Loredan on the back and shows him receiving the staff of office.

Roman poppyhead beaker

Date 2nd century

Found Liverpool Street

Under Roman law you couldn’t bury people within the city limits, so there’s a big arc of Roman cemeteries around London. This beaker is from one of those sites and has been washed out from the higher ground to where we found it. It would have held an offering for the deceased, like wine.

Medieval ice skates

Date Between 1000 and 1500 AD

Found Liverpool Street

After the fall of the Roman Empire, London was abandoned and marsh built up around the Moorgate area. During the Medieval period it would freeze during winter and Londoners skated on it by tying the polished shinbones of cattle to their feet. They’re not from the same pair; we’ve found enough to know that these things got lost regularly.

Victorian chamber pot

Date 19th century

Found Stepney Green

In the 19th century, pottery and decorative items were much more common in ordinary people’s houses, although this one is practical. It was found in a cesspit and the text around the outside includes ‘When you in it want to piss... Remember they who gave you this’.