Just learned about a 3,000-year-old city found under a parking lot in London

I was watching a show on the History Channel last night. They said workers digging for a new building in 2010 hit a huge wall. It turned out to be a whole Roman settlement from before the city was even called London. They found over 10,000 artifacts under the asphalt. Has anyone else seen the stuff they pulled out of there?

3 comments

3 Comments

susan_wells2mo ago

Admittedly I used to roll my eyes at construction delays for "old stuff" but this changed my mind completely. Like @carr.willow said, you really do only get one shot. After reading about the Roman settlement stuff I started looking into it more and they found like a whole wooden writing tablet with someone's shopping list on it from 200 AD. Just imagine how much we'd never know if that crew had just paved over it to hit their schedule. The burial ground thing nora10 mentioned gives me chills too, its wild how much history is just sitting under the concrete we walk on every day.

carr.willow3mo ago

The scale of that find is just wild. Tbh, the best thing they did was stop the dig immediately and call in archaeologists. Seen too many sites get wrecked because a construction crew just plows through to meet a deadline. Ngl, it's a huge pain for the builders, but you only get one shot at stuff that old. The museum collections from that site are insane now because they did it right.

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nora103mo ago

My buddy's construction crew hit a burial ground last year. They shut down for three months while experts mapped everything out. The local historical society still thanks them for not being idiots about it.