New PDF release: Unearthing London: The Ancient World Beneath the Metropolis

By Simon Webb

Revealing the city's hidden ritual and mythological panorama, whole with appendices on jogging the ritual panorama today
 
A learn of the just about forgotten ritual panorama which lies hidden underneath the streets of the fashionable urban, this publication unearths the town not anyone knows—a huge and complex community of hilltop shrines, tracks, sacred rivers, mounds, ditches, enclosures, and man-made hills, all more than 2,000 years outdated. This prehistoric panorama, molded and formed by means of early women and men, decided the placement of such well-known London landmarks as St Paul's Cathedral, the Tower of London, and Westminster Abbey. It has now not been thoroughly obliterated by means of the concrete and tarmac and this ebook explores what continues to be of those early websites. It additionally examines the non secular ideals and mythology of the pre-Roman region which grew to become London, and discusses how those legends tie in with a number of the historical positive factors of the city.

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It was therefore only proper that a certain proportion of the finished products should be returned to the river as a thanks offering for the use of the water or gift of the flint. It was a bargain between men and the spirits of the water, whether gods or dead ancestors. Every activity undertaken by prehistoric people – hunting, flint knapping, farming, mining and everything else – was a joint venture between man and the spirits. These invisible entities could make or mar any enterprise. We still have vague memories of co-operative ventures of this kind between men and the gods.

We are able at least to make intelligent guesses about henges and causewayed enclosures. About another part of the ritual landscape of West London, the Stanwell cursus, even guesswork is tricky and uncertain. Cursuses are only known in Britain and Ireland. They typically consist of two parallel ditches, the material from which is banked up between the ditches. The usual form is that this creates two ridges with a clear path between them. We have absolutely no idea what the purpose of these structures might have been.

Although none have yet been excavated, it would be surprising if similar enclosures were not a part of the landscape in central London; there was no shortage of gravel spits and islets in central London. The enclosure at Yeoveny Lodge was still in use during the Roman period. A polygonal structure was found during the investigations of the site and it seems that this spot continued to be of religious importance up to and including the Saxon invasions which followed the fall of the Roman Empire.

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