Archaeologists discover a medieval skeleton with his boots still on in London

Archaeologists excavating a site along with the Thames Tideway Tunnel—a massive pipeline nicknamed London’s “super sewer”—have revealed the skeleton of a medieval man who literally died with his boots on.

“It’s extremely rare to discover any boots from the late 15th century, let alone a skeleton still wearing them,” says Beth Richardson of the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA).

“And these are very unusual boots for the period—thigh boots, with the tops, turned down. They would have been expensive, and how this man came to own them is a mystery. Were they secondhand? Did he steal them? We don’t know.”

Unearthing skeletons amid major construction projects is not unusual in London, where throughout the centuries land has been reused countless times and many burial grounds have been built over and forgotten.

However, archaeologists noticed right away that this skeleton was different. The position of the body—face down, right arm over the head, left arm bent back on itself—suggests that the man was not deliberately buried.

It is also unlikely that he would have been laid to rest in leather boots, which were expensive and highly prized.  In light of those clues, archaeologists believe the man died accidentally and his body was never recuperated, although the cause of death is unclear.

Perhaps he fell into the river and could not swim. Or possibly he became trapped in the tidal mud and drowned.

Sailor, fisherman, or “mudlarker”?

500 years ago this stretch of the Thames—2 miles or so downstream from the Tower of London—was a bustling maritime neighbourhood of wharves and warehouses, workshops and taverns.

The river was flanked by the Bermondsey Wall, a medieval earthwork about fifteen feet high built to protect riverbank property from tidal surges.

Given the neighbourhood, the booted man may have been a sailor or a fisherman, a possibility reinforced by physical clues.

Pronounced grooves in his teeth may have been caused by repeatedly clenching a rope. Or perhaps he was a “mudlarker,” a slang term for those who scavenge along the Thames muddy shore at low tide.

The man’s wader-like thigh boots would have been ideal for such work.

“We know he was very powerfully built,” says Niamh Carty, an osteologist, or skeletal specialist, at MOLA.

“The muscle attachments on his chest and shoulder are very noticeable. The muscles were built by doing lots of heavy, repetitive work over a long period of time.”

It was work that took a physical toll. Albeit only in his early thirties, the booted man suffered from osteoarthritis, and vertebrae in his back had already begun to fuse as the result of years of bending and lifting.

Wounds to his left hip suggest he walked with a limp, and his nose had been broken at least once. There is evidence of blunt force trauma on his forehead that had healed before he died.

“He did not have an easy life,” says Carty. “Early thirties was middle age back then, but even so, his biological age was older.”

The examination is continuing. Isotope investigation will shed light on where the man grew up, whether he was an immigrant or a native Londoner, and what kind of diet he had.

“His family never had any answers or a grave,” says Carty. “What we are doing is an act of remembrance. We’re allowing his story to finally be told.”

1,000-year-old shoe in the River Thames that was ‘last worn in the run-up to the Battle of Hastings’

A 1,000-year-old shoe has been found intact in the muddy river bed of the River Thames. Steve Tomlinson, 47, was exploring the estuary when he stumbled across the unassuming object protruding from the mudflats. The amateur archaeologist was unaware of its historical significance and was urged by his peers to send it off for expert analysis. 

A Scottish institute carefully carbon-dated the shoe and found it be from between 1017 and 1059AD, during the era Anglo-Saxons and Vikings inhabited the British Isles before William the conqueror toppled King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

The finding may be one of the last surviving relics from the Viking occupation of Britain before the successful invasion of the French.  Results of the laboratory tests found there was a 95.4 per cent probability that the shoe is from between 1017-1059AD. 

Mr Tomlinson, from Birchington, Kent, made the discovery of the leather moccasin in October last year while searching in the estuary and the results have just been returned.  

He said: ‘I was out and about just up that area and it was sticking out of a bit of clay mud so I pulled it out.

‘I first thought it was a bit of that but the history of the Thames goes through all the ages so I put the call out to archaeologist and groups and they said ‘oh my God preserve it straight away.’

Mr Tomlinson says he ‘can’t quite believe’ the outcome.

He added: ‘It is a rare find and amazingly it is still in superb preserved condition, probably due to the fact it was very well preserved in clay along with the sea, keeping it constantly waterlogged.

‘It is so well preserved that the original toe and heel marks can be seen.

‘It just goes to show you never know what lies beneath.

‘I am over the moon with the result.’

The shoes may soon be on display in a museum from a ‘well-known museum’.

When Did Vikings Invade Ireland? 

In the 10,000 years since Stone Age cavemen first arrived, the Irish have established distinct cultural regions.  Researchers have recently found 23 distinct genetic clusters, separated by geography by comparing mutations from almost 1,000 Irish genomes with over 6,000 from Britain and mainland Europe.

These are most distinct in western Ireland, but less pronounced in the east, where historical migrations have erased the genetic variations.   They also detected genes from Europe and calculated the timing of the historical migrations of the Norse-Vikings and the Anglo-Normans to Ireland, yielding dates consistent with historical records. 

The study paints a new and more complex picture of the genetic landscape of Ireland and demonstrates the signatures that historical migrations have left on the modern Irish genome. The Vikings left their genetic footprint in Ireland when they invaded the island, launching their first attack in 795 AD by raiding an island monastery.

The Vikings continued to stage small-scale attacks on unprotected coastal monasteries before sailing to River Shannon in the 830s to steal from inland religious settlements. By the 840s, the Vikings began to establish permanent ship bases along the coastline from which they could plunder all year. 

The Vikings also enslaved some of the Irish people and were able to raid the land by taking advantage of the fact that Ireland was particularly politically fractured.

The Vikings, however, did not conquer the island – by the middle of the 10th century, they failed to control the territory in Ireland.  The fractured political system in Ireland worked in the island’s favour – if one ruler was killed, it did not destabilize the entire island. 

Norse influence in Ireland began to decline by the time of the rise of king Brian Boru.  He sacked the Viking town in Limerick in 968 AD and became the overlord of Cork, Wexford and Waterford.  In 1014, the king’s army routed the Vikings and their allies at the Battle of Clontarf outside Dublin, but a small group of Norseman killed the elderly kind as he was praying in his tent after the battle. 

The Viking remained in Ireland after agreeing to pay a tribute, but the Viking Age in Ireland didn’t come to a definitive end until the Norman invasion in the 1170s and the last Norse king of Dublin escaped to the Orkney Islands. 

This is the largest fossilized human turd ever found

Sometimes, scientists really are talking sh*t! The proof is in this fossilized excrement, which dates back to the 9th century. It was discovered about 40 years ago, and is famous for being the most expensive poo in the world!

The fossil is known as the Lloyds Bank Coloprite, the word “Coprolite” simply meaning fossilized dung. The rest of its name refers to the fact that it was found in 1972 by construction workers during the building of a Lloyds TSB branch in York, in the northwest of England.

Put simply, this is a fossilized human turd. Not only that but the largest and – bizarrely – most valuable on record.

It dates back to approximately the 9th century and the person responsible is believed to be a Viking. It currently rests at the Jórvík Viking Centre in the city of York, England.

Jórvík was the Viking name for York, with the Center part of an area that has yielded numerous treasures. Whether the Coprolite can be described as treasure is a question for the ages. That said, the details are fascinating.

The reason it’s named after Lloyds Bank isn’t some weird corporate branding exercise. The hefty deposit, measuring 8″ x 2″ (20 cm by 5 cm), was found beneath the site of the famous bank in 1972. And here’s a fun fact for the day – “Coprolite” means fossilized human faeces! Paleofeces is also a term used to describe ancient human droppings found as part of archaeological expeditions.

This is one mighty archaeological achievement. The Australian Academy of Science observed in 2017, “Human coprolites are very rare and tend to only be preserved in either very dry or frozen environments, however, samples have been found that date back to the Late Paleolithic—around 22,000 years ago.”

For a complete specimen to last this long is awe-inspiring, if not exactly need-to-know information. How do they know it came from a Viking? The ingredients that went into the epic production provide some clues.

“He was not a great vegetable eater,” wrote the Guardian in 2003, “instead of living on large amounts of meat and grains such as bran, despite fruit stones, nutshells and other stools containing matter from vegetables such as leeks being found on the same site.”

That all sounds normal enough, however the Viking’s bowels were also packed with creepy crawlies.

In 2016, the website Spangenhelm referred to “the presence of several hundred parasitic eggs (whipworm)”, which “suggests he or she was riddled with intestinal parasite worms (maw-worm).”

These unwanted invaders can cause serious health problems. The BBC describes conditions such as “stomach aches, diarrhoea, and inflammation of the bowel.” Get enough worms and things get worse, as “symptoms may simulate those of gastric and duodenal ulcers.”

Parasites aren’t known for standing still either. Adults “can migrate from the intestine and enter other organs where they can cause serious damage, even moving into such places as the ear and the nose of unfortunate suffers.”

On a more agreeable note, the malodorous museum piece has been valued at an extraordinary $39,000. No less a publication than the Wall Street Journal reported on the coprolite in 1991, with one source claiming it was “as valuable as the Crown Jewels”.

British TV company Channel 4 delved deeper into the desiccated dropping in 2003, giving viewers an insight into what an ancient turd can reveal about the past. According to them, “if we ever succeed in extracting and analyzing DNA from the excrement, it could be possible to determine the kind of flora that this Viking had in his intestines.”

Those thinking that the excrement-based exhibit might lead to a boring existence are wrong. In fact, it’s faced potential disaster. 2003 is a significant year for the Lloyd’s Bank Coprolite, as it had a brush with destruction courtesy of an unsuspecting educator.

A Guardian report from the time writes that “all was well until two weeks ago when its display stand collapsed in the hands of an unfortunate teacher and, crashing to the floor, the rock-like lump broke into three pieces.”

Talk about a potentially sticky situation. What happens when fossilized faeces is damaged? It’s carefully glued back together of course! This saw the turd reconstructed as if it were a Roman vase or Aztec plate.

With careful maintenance, it’s hoped the Lloyds Bank Coprolite will go on for many years to come. For the individual whose historic diet resulted in the artefact, it was simply a bodily function. Centuries on, experts are flushed with their success in discovering it.

A couple find £5,000,000 in one of biggest ever treasure hoards

In an area in Somerset, in the West of England, a pair of metal detectorists found their existence when they uncovered a hoard of ancient coins worth about 6 million dollars. The historical discovery, which has been deemed to be one of the greatest hidden treasures in the UK, is to be revealed in the British Museum.

The 2,571 Anglo-Saxon and Norman coins were unearthed by Adam Staples ‘ and Lisa Grace Treasure hunters when they searched farmland with their trusty metal detectors.

The couples have described the hoard as “stunning” and “absolutely mind-blowing” in an interview with Treasure Hunting Magazine.

They reported their find to the authorities as required by UK law, and the coins were soon sent to the British Museum for evaluation.

The British Museum has been assessing the find for the past seven months and is due to reveal more information about the coins to the public on Wednesday.

A spokesperson for the institution confirmed to the Daily Mail that the “large hoard” was handed over as possible treasure and that it appears to be “an important discovery.”

Under the UK’s 1996 Treasure Act, if a find is officially declared treasure, it must first be offered for sale to a museum at a price set by the British Museum’s Treasure Valuation Committee. If no museum can raise the money to acquire the coins, they can then be offered for sale at auction.

The owner of the land where the coins were found is entitled to half of the proceeds. The metal detectorists are keeping the exact location of their discovery under wraps, although the trove is called the Chew Valley Hoard after an area in North Somerset.

A coin expert at the London auctioneers Dix Noonan Webb has valued the coins at around £5 million ($6 million).

They include mint-condition silver King Harold II pennies, coins from the reign of William the Conqueror, which could be worth as much as £5,000 ($6,000) each, as well as pieces minted by previously unknown moneyers.

The King Harold II coins are particularly rare due to his short reign. The last Anglo-Saxon king was on the throne for just nine months before he died during the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

The expert said that the hoard may prove too pricey for museums, which might have to launch an appeal for sponsors to raise funds to acquire them.

The coins would have belonged to a wealthy person who probably buried them for safekeeping at some point after the Norman Invasion of 1066 and probably before 1072.

The biggest collection of buried treasure ever discovered in the UK was the Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork, but this latest find could worth $1 million more, and have as great or even more historic value.

Unusual Roman Villa Uncovered in Northern England

BBC News reports that a large villa complex with its own bathhouse has been discovered at a construction site in northern England. Keith Emerick of Historic England said the house, which has a circular central room flanked by additional rooms, is the first of its kind to be found in Britain.

Keepmoat Homes, which was hoping to develop a new housing estate in the Eastfield area of the North Yorkshire region, found the ruins of the settlement.

But the importance of the find may well have caused a headache for bosses of the firm, with Historic England saying it’s ‘easily the most important discovery of its kind.

Historians believe they’ve identified a whole complex of buildings. It includes a tower-shaped structure, which is thought to have had rooms and a bathhouse leading from it.

They are continuing to study the site, but so far it’s thought it would have been built by a wealthy landowner and could have become a religious building, a ‘stately home cum – gentleman’s club’, or even a combination of both.

Keith Emerick, inspector of ancient monuments at Historic England, said: ‘One of the descriptions we had was that it is something like a religious building that is almost like a gentleman’s club, there’s a bathhouse as well. So it’s a really interesting hybrid building at the moment.’

He added:

These archaeological remains are a fantastic find and are far more than we ever dreamed of discovering at this site. They are already giving us better knowledge and understanding of Roman Britain.

We are grateful to Keepmoat Homes for their sensitive and professional approach to helping ensure the future conservation of this important historical site.

Emerick told The Guardian: ‘It’s not like a jigsaw, where each new discovery adds to the picture, each new discovery actually gives a twist to the kaleidoscope and changes the picture entirely. This is a really exciting discovery and definitely of national importance.’

Not only is it a first for Britain, but it could also be a first for the whole of the former Roman Empire.

Emerick added: ‘I would say this is one of the most important Roman discoveries in the past decade, actually. Easily.’

Keepmoat Homes have changed the initial plans and will not build on top of the site, but will still build in the area.

Historic England hopes the remains will be accessible to the public in future.

In the UK found children’s shoes which is 600 years old

A child’s shoe discovered during an excavation in Devon maybe hundreds of years old. When archaeologists discovered the ancient footwear during a dig in Newton Abbot, they were shocked.

The leather shoe, which has been well-preserved in the site’s clay soil, maybe from the 1400s.

The team involved in the dig have voiced their excitement at finding such an everyday object intact after centuries in the ground.

‘It’s this day-to-day stuff which is exciting,’ said Simon Sworn, of Cotswold Archaeology and the site’s senior archaeological project officer.

‘The job is not all about kings under car parks,’ he added.

Along with the shoe, a number of other artifacts have been unearthed at the site.

Other historic treasures include an iron spur from a child’s boot, three wooden barrel bases, and a 27 inch (70 cm) diameter Dartmoor granite millstone, used to grind wheat into flour.

‘We will keep going down until we hit natural geology – or water at the site makes it unsafe,’ added Mr. Sworn. 

The team is hoping to uncover more household artifacts dating back to the 13th century when Newton Abbot was a hastily built new town of its day.

Mr. Sworn explained: ‘As the name suggests, Newton Abbot was essentially founded as a medieval new town but there is some evidence for 6th/7th-century activity in the immediate vicinity of the site so we may find earlier remains lurking below the medieval burgage plots.’

He added: ‘We’ve been learning a lot about how the town developed and how it came to be the place we live in – and who the people were who made Newton Abbot what it is today.’

Conditions at the site have enabled artifacts to be so well preserved due to a lack of oxygen in the soil.

The waterlogged conditions have enabled organic materials such as leather and wood, which would have rotted long ago, to last for centuries.

‘I’ve never worked on a site where so much local interest has been shown,’ added Mr Sworn.

He added: ‘A lot of perceptive questions have been asked – and we’ve been happy to answer them.

‘Over the next few weeks, we will gradually peel away the medieval layers and go deeper.’ 

Research uncovers how Christianity changed Anglo-Saxon burial practices

In a field three miles south of Cambridge, the bones of a mysterious Anglo-Saxon princess who died thirteen and a half centuries ago have been discovered. She died at the age of 16 and was buried with a small solid gold Christian cross encrusted with garnets on her chest, lying on a special high-status funerary bed.

Her true identity has yet to be revealed. However, she was most likely a member of one of the period’s newly Christianized Anglo-Saxon royal families.

She was buried fully clothed, her bronze and iron chatelaine (belt hook) and purse, still attached to her leather belt.

A clue to the circumstances of her death is the presence of three other individuals buried in separate graves alongside her (two women aged around 20 and one other slightly older individuals of indeterminate sex, but conceivably female).

It’s likely that they died at the same time – probably from some sort of epidemic. Significantly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions that England was devastated by the plague in 664 AD (around the very time that the archaeological evidence also suggests they died).

The archaeological investigation – carried out by Cambridge University Archaeological Unit – has also revealed that they were interred adjacent to a high-status settlement consisting of a 12-meter long timber hall and at least half a dozen other buildings with substantial semi-subterranean storage cellars.

Among the finds unearthed were fragments of posh French-originating shiny black ceramic wine jugs – in England a type of pottery previously found mainly on monastic sites.

The female graves, the high-status nature of the site, and the Christian burial rite all combine to suggest that the princess and her companions may well have been nuns – and that the settlement may have been part of a nunnery.

It’s known that the various newly Christianized Anglo-Saxon monarchs of the time competed with each other to establish monasteries and nunneries as proof of their Christian piety. Indeed it’s conceivable that the princess’s parents enrolled their daughter in such a nunnery to further demonstrate their commitment to their new faith (a common practice at the time).

The area itself probably enjoyed some sort of royal or otherwise elevated status inherited from Roman and immediately post-Roman times when it formed part of a native Romano-British territory centered on Cambridge and known as the Granta Saete – the territory (saete) of the River Granta (now more often known as the Cam).

Just 500 meters to the north of the princess’s grave in the village of Grantchester (derived from the ‘Granta Saete’ territorial name) – the site of what was once a substantial Roman villa, the owners of which conceivably became the area’s ruling family.

Historians believe that the Roman villa, the high-status Anglo-Saxon settlement, and the princess’s grave were in one of several quasi-independent mini-kingdoms which acted as buffer states between the larger kingdoms of East Anglia and Mercia (central England).

The princess may well, therefore, have been the daughter of a mid-7th-century king of Mercia or East Anglia or of one of the buffer states in between.

Continuing scientific investigations over the next few months are expected to reveal more information about the princess, her companions, and the site as a whole. Isotopic tests are likely to reveal their geographical origins by demonstrating where they had spent their early childhoods.

Other isotopic analyses will reveal their diet. Efforts will also be made to reconstruct aspects of the princess’s clothing from fragments of mineralized textile which survived in her grave.

“This is an incredibly important and exciting discovery which is already shedding remarkable new light on the early years of English Christianity,” said Alison Dickens, a senior manager at the Cambridge University Archaeological Unit.

The excavation carried out near the village of Trumpington, south of Cambridge, and the ongoing scientific investigations, have been funded by the Trumpington Meadows Land Company – a joint housing development venture between London’s Grosvenor property company and USS, the UK-wide universities pension scheme.

Seahenge: A Subaquatic Monument of the European Bronze Age

Seahenge, which is also known as Holme I, was a prehistoric monument located in the village of Holme-next-the-Sea, near Old Hunstanton in the English county of Norfolk.

A timber circle with an upturned tree root in the center, Seahenge was apparently built in the 21st century BC, during the early Bronze Age in Britain. Contemporary theory is that it was used for ritual purposes.

The structure was perceived to be under threat from damage and erosion from the sea – as such it was fully excavated. This involved the removal of the timbers, a program of stratigraphic recording, and environmental sampling.

The structure comprised an elliptical circumference of fifty-five large oak posts and one smaller upright timber, set around an inverted oak tree.

Maximum diameter of 6.78m, with the tree, set slightly southwest of the center.

The central tree had two holes cut through the trunk on opposite sides, with a length of honeysuckle rope passed through the holes and tied in a knot.

A maximum of twenty-five trees was used to build the structure. Evidence of woodworking was recovered, including felling, trimming, splitting, and flattening.

422 pieces of wood debris were found, including woodchips. Toolmarks recorded from a total of fifty-nine possible tools; the maximum number of tools used is probably nearer 51.

The toolmarks are probably the largest assemblage of Early Bronze Age toolmarks yet recorded in Britain.

The structure was built at a single point in time. Dendrochronological dating of fifty-five samples revealed that the timber circle was constructed in the spring or early summer of 2049 BC, during the Early Bronze Age.

The environmental analysis demonstrated that the structure was built on a salt marsh. During the Bronze Age, freshwater reed swamp and alder carr spread over the saltmarsh and the monument itself.

Two timbers (context 35=37 and 65) may have been the first timbers set in place. These were placed on a southwest to northeast alignment, in the approximate direction of the midsummer rising sun and midwinter setting sun. This may have been deliberate or unintentional.

All but one of the circumference timbers were placed with their bark facing outwards. The timber with the split face facing outwards must have had significance.

The structure has been interpreted in various ways. These include a monument to mark the death of an individual, the death of a tree or the regenerative failure of trees, and the commemoration of an event, life, or the culmination of a celebration or festival.

The fragmentary remains of the timber circle are now in the King’s Lynn Museum.