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Bronze Implements from the City of London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2012

R. E. M. Wheeler
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Extract

The lower Thames, both below and more especially above the City of London, has yielded some hundreds of relics of the Bronze Age. In a few cases these may indicate the site of a ford, and at one point—Sion Reach—the association of exotic types suggests a local settlement of a somewhat special character. But for the most part these river-finds are of mixed type and period, and can only be referred to the general use of the river as a highway. They throw little or no light, incidentally, upon the vexed question of the origins of London.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Antiquaries Journal , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , July 1927 , pp. 294 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1927

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References

page 294 note 1 Crawford, O. G. S., Antiquaries Journal, ii (1922), p. 33.Google Scholar

page 294 note 2 Thanks are due to Mr. O. M. Dalton and Mr. Reginald A. Smith of the British Museum, and to Mr. J. L. Douthwaite and Mr. Q. Waddington of the Guildhall Library, for information as to specimens under their charge.

page 295 note 1 British Museum, Bronze Age Guide (1920), p. 31; R. E. M. Wheeler, Prehistoric and Roman Wales, p. 158.

page 296 note 1 The various successive types of leaf-sword must have overlapped one another considerably, and it is dangerous therefore to calculate the strength of the earliest ‘invasions’ too literally on the basis of the number and distribution of the earliest type of the sword in this country (H. J. E. Peake's type D). At the same time the relatively restricted area in which these early swords are found strengthens the probability that they represent in a general way the actual scope of the first invasions. Mr. Peake notes that, of leaf-swords of type D, ‘only six have been recorded in Britain, all from the mouth of the Thames or from the south and east coasts’ (The Bronze Age and the Celtic World, p. 96). The succeeding types (E, etc.) gradually extend the scope in a perfectly logical manner. Thus type E, with 58 specimens in the Thames basin, 15 in the Fens, 14 from the other east-coast counties, and only 11 from the rest of England and Wales, still suggests a limited penetration; type F, on the other hand, reached the west of the British Isles in great abundance. The hybrid swords discussed in the present paper naturally group with type D.

page 296 note 2 A heavy tanged dagger of the same period, found, it is said, amongst ancient piles in the Thames at Hampton Court, is now in the London Museum. This find is significant in connexion with the series from Sion Reach referred to above.

page 298 note 1 The problem of the derivation of the socketed axe has recently been raised anew by Dr. H. S. Harrison in Man, 1926, no. 143.