About the "London before London" gallery
by curators Jon Cotton and Adrian Green
Background
The London before London gallery covers with the period known as ‘prehistory’ – the time before written records. It spans some 450,000 years from the creation of the present Thames Valley to the foundation of Roman Londinium.
The gallery has four key messages:
- There have been changes to the landscape caused by extremes of climate, movement in sea and river levels and later by human intervention.
- The Thames is of fundamental importance to the region. It helped mould the landscape and provided resources for early human groups. The Thames also acted as an artery for communication; as a political and physical boundary; and as a focus for offerings of human remains and precious objects.
- This vast period of time is one of huge changes, from the arrival of the first ancestral human species to the development of complex political communities on the eve of the Roman conquest. Early people were dynamic, adaptable and intelligent individuals.
- ‘Prehistory’ did not stop with the arrival of the Romans. It bequeathed to history a recognisably modern agricultural landscape and the site for the new city of Londinium. It also provided people and raw materials to fill the city as well as language and the basis of some religious beliefs.
The Gallery
London before London is divided into three parts:
- six sections covering the story of the Thames valley from 450,000 years ago up until the arrival of the Romans in 43AD. Each of these sections addresses a number of key themes: people, habitation, subsistence and belief.
- the Great River – a continuous display of over 300 objects found in the Thames, arranged in date order along one side of the gallery. The text in this section explains importance of the Thames during this period and describes the different groups of objects on display.
- the landscape wall – a continuous display of images, plans of archaeological sites, poetry and quotations around the outside of the gallery showing the way that human communities have increasingly modified and changed the landscape in the Thames Valley throughout this period.
The virtual gallery gives an opportunity to read all the text and find out more about the objects displayed in London before London. There are two ways to access this information, either through the key themes or through the main sections of the gallery.
Each catalogue page about an object includes the number of the case where it is displayed and its accession number (a unique number given to all museum objects). With this information objects can be located within the gallery. Every case is numbered on the top or bottom left-hand corner. The captions inside the cases list the accession numbers of the objects on display.
