On the banks of the Thames

The Bronze-Age River Thames was a wider, wilder waterway than the one we know today. Unrestricted by embankments and uncrossed by bridges, its often-changing course and large floodplain dominated the landscape. It was both a barrier between north and south, and an important navigation route, vital for travel and trade at a time when much of southern England was heavily wooded and otherwise impassable.

The river was also likely to have been the focus for the religious or ritual life of Bronze-Age people living along its banks. Archaeological finds made in or alongside the Thames include a wide array of late Bronze-Age and Iron-Age weaponry. Some of these objects had clearly been used in battle (it is thought that the Thames was an important tribal boundary throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages). Finds falling into this category include a bronze shield that had been punctured by a spear – and the grim discovery of a Bronze Age spearhead embedded in a human pelvis. But others were deposited there deliberately as sacrificial or symbolic offerings.

Among these are thought to be the two Bronze Age spearheads found alongside the remains of the wooden structure leading out into the Thames that was investigated by Time Team at Vauxhall. The way that the spearheads had been driven deep into the foreshore suggested that they had been placed there deliberately, probably as some sort of 'votive' or ritual offering, rather than simply lost or abandoned in battle.

Bronze-Age expert Francis Pryor suggested that the structure at Vauxhall may have had both a practical and a more symbolic purpose. It could have served as a bridge or jetty of some sort, as well as being associated with a ritual or religious site.

The Thames at this time was an untamed river, fed by numerous tributaries that have since been culverted and now run underground. Two such tributaries joined the main river at Vauxhall, where they would have joined with the eddies and currents of the tidal Thames – just the sort of place that Bronze-Age people might have associated with the gods or spirits of the river.

This entire stretch of the Thames through modern-day London consisted of various channels running through often-treacherous mudflats and small islands or 'eyots'. Westminster Abbey, for example, was built on what used to be Thorney Island, which lay between two branches of the river Tyburn where it joined the Thames. Late Bronze-Age pottery and earlier Neolithic flints and stone tools have been found here beneath Parliament Square and the site of the new Westminster underground station, which was excavated when the Jubilee Line extension was being built. Any 'bridge' at Vauxhall might have linked one such islet with the foreshore.