The Museum of London

This was a museum I had not heard of on any of my previous visits to London and so I had no idea what exactly its focus was or where it was located; but I ended up quite happy with the subject and scope: the prehistoric area of what has become London all the way up until current times (although those exhibits were unavailable for view) giving a picture into the way people lived and what distresses they had to cope with throughout the city’s evolution.

Our guide was the curator of Prehistory for the museum, John Cotton, and I for one was quite happy to hear about some prehistoric situations, having heard just a bit so far about the Kings and Queens, it was nice to hear about some people without famous names and with nuchal buns. It did seem quite funny to be interested in this though, as Cotton explained to us the issues of promoting the prehistoric collections as most people just want to know about Roman London, Tudor London, or Victorian London, and perhaps not so much about the time before those periods, which does seem familiar, there’s a certain definition of culture that prehistory tends to lack.

For me, it’s mainly about skulls, which thankfully they had several on display amongst the artifacts that have been out into the displays. One that we were shown on slide and then turned up in the museum was a trepanned Neanderthal skull wherein the recipient of the hole through the skull had actually lived through the procedure and the edges of the break showed signs of healing, which was very interesting to see. There were other skulls in the prehistoric area of extinct animals such as predecessors of our current oxen and cattle and a few more human skulls with various kinds of damage, one had very clear incisions on his temple indicating a blow from a blade.

And of course they had the usual bifaces and axe heads and sherds that make up the prehistoric landscape, as well as a burial where the body was used to recreate what one person of the prehistoric London area would have looked like (called the Shepperton woman). Their collection of prehistoric tools and pottery, especially the larger examples of pottery was very impressive, I haven’t ever seen that many axes and bifaces in one museum together. One of the other highlights of the pottery was that the museum was able to get an actual mold of a prehistoric person’s fingertip out of one of the decorational features on a pot, they think it belongs to a woman and she has quite nice, long nails. It did serve to solidify part of my theory on pottery decoration, that the patterns are mostly born out of the same sort of distraction that causes doodling during class. The repetitive nature of the cord patterns on the pots at the Museum of London is very similar to the cord pottery of prehistoric Japan’s Jomon period, reliefs based on rope like coil patterns and hash marks and that really remind me of what I used to do to my notebooks during algebra in high school.

The prehistoric collection also made for a nice background set up for the events of later London that the museum covers in depth, such as when the Romans came later on and the area on the Thames came to be known as ‘Londinium’ and the Great Fire of 1666. There were so many examples of actual pieces of work from the times, such as an early fire fighting helmets and examples of gateways and doors and sculptural pieces of the architecture that made me really feel like in this museum there was not going to be an ‘I don’t know’ portion of the tour and that was well appreciated. Although perhaps I’d prefer more than just that rather hard to watch video about the plague…