This River Is Filled With Human Bones but No One Knows Exactly Why

• Why so many human remains from the Bronze and Iron Age have surfaced from the Thames remains unknown.

• Researchers have dated a large number of the skeletons to those time periods, which possibly means something significant happened back then.

• While the bodies could be the remnants of some sort of ritual, there is suspicion of ancient battles on the banks of the Thames, which is something the researchers will be investigating next.

“Promiscuous heaps of slain laid there,

Their life gore tinged the water clear,

Spreading around the ruddy stain,

Which marked the spot of strife and pain”

These bloody words were written by 19th-Century antiquarian H.S. Cuming in On the discovery of Celtic crania in the vicinity of London. It was the first ever published account of human remains being dredged from the River Thames during the construction of the Victoria Bridge.

An unusual amount of skulls were found among bronze and iron weapons, and Cuming imagined they were the grisly remains of an Iron Age battle. Was he onto something?

Since Cuming’s time, hundreds of human bones have surfaced from the Thames, most of them dating back to the Bronze and Iron Age. How they ended up there is a question that has been haunting Londoners for years. Nichola Arthur, a curator at the Natural History Museum in London, and her team of researchers have now further investigated why these nameless corpses went to their watery grave by analyzing radiocarbon dates from 30 skeletons.

“[There is] a predominance of Bronze and Iron Age dates [which] emphasizes the need to explore the Thames assemblage in the broader context of watery deposition practices of later prehistoric north-west Europe,” Arthur said in a study recently published in the journal Antiquity.

This isn’t the first time Arthur has encountered ancient bones in the river. In an earlier study, she takes Cuming’s assumptions into account while delving into the history of the Thames bodies, which were nearly forgotten until the late 1980s when archaeologists Richard Bradley and Ken Gordon took an interest in them. Bradley and Gordon’s observations of metalwork that was also found in Bronze Age graves would back up later radiocarbon dating of the bones to confirm when these people lived.

Arthur and her team compared their new radiocarbon dates with 31 previous findings and were able to place the bodies, found mostly upstream, in the Bronze and Iron Age. They were anywhere from about 4,000 to slightly under 2,000 years old. But why this time period?

Something of historical significance must have happened then. Arthur, who has focused much of her studies on the cultural significance of water burials, thinks it may have been part of some sort of ritual in which skulls and other significant skeletal remains were deposited in the river.

Other archaeologists think Cuming’s theory about a violent clash of armies might have been more than an assumption. For millennia, the Thames supplied water and food to London in addition to being an important trade route, which archaeologist Christopher Knüsel sees as something worth fighting for.

Knüsel’s own research on the Thames corpses argues that the skulls and weapons being found so close together is no coincidence. While he acknowledges that this could have been a funerary practice in an initial study of the bones, a later study on warfare and violence in ancient Europe suggests that battles could have raged over control of the Thames, and the river claimed the victims.

Evidence of skeletal trauma on the remains also convinces Knüsel that something more than just mortuary rituals was going on. Arthur will now focus on analyzing the injuries for a future study, which may finally demystify why so many corpses sank to the bottom of the Thames. It might even prove Cuming right.

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