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The time
Today: Sunday 8 April 2001 – a team of men and women pick their way down to the foreshore of the Thames for an adventure in time. The journey could take them back 3,000 years.
Then: Bronze Age Britain - the people making their way onto the river banks lived in the Thames valley, a fertile area where the focus was on setting out field systems not on building huge monuments. They were to struggle for weeks, months or even years to build a platform out to the Thames. Were they constructing the basis of a bridge, or maybe a jetty? That’s for Time Team to find out.
Today it’s in the heart of London, one of the biggest cities in the world, which sprawls for miles north and south of the River Thames in a man-made conurbation housing millions of people. The site is flanked by tall office blocks, industry and housing.
During the Bronze Age it was largely a forested area at a point where a tributary river joined the Thames. This would have been a powerful and important place to the prehistoric people who inhabited the area.
The point
Today Time Team has come to find out if some timber posts peeping out of the water on the shore of the Thames are the remains of London’s first bridge or the supports of a platform where Bronze Age people threw gifts to the river gods. The timbers are quickly eroding and the team are going to try to remove one so that it can be preserved and displayed at the Museum of London.
During the Bronze Age the site may have been especially significant because it was where salt and fresh water merged and there was a huge tidal surge. The fresh water meeting the seawater would have caused the river to flow in different directions during the day. This would undoubtedly have been a strange and intriguing phenomenon for Bronze Age people to experience.
The means
Using all of the latest scientific techniques to remove wood samples from each timber, Time Team are going to lab test them to confirm their age and to piece together as much as possible about the significance of this structure.
The period from 2600 to 700BC is called the Bronze Age because it was a time when metal materials of copper and bronze started to become widely used for the first time in Britain. Though flint tools were still a big part of everyday life, there is a good chance that bronze tools were used to complete the carpenters' tool kit that fashioned the posts being excavated today. People would have worked together to fell the timber and get it down to the river either using oxen, people power or even by floating it along the river. How they put it into place is open to debate.