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Harvesting wheat during the Middle Bronze Age.
Download an animation showing a water hole of Bronze Age date (requires QuickTime).
©BAA 2003
Produced by Marshall Lightfoot plc
Reproduced by kind permission BAA
A farmer herds his cows into the settlement, with roundhouses in the background
Download an animation showing the Iron Age settlement (requires QuickTime).
©BAA 2003
Produced by Marshall Lightfoot plc
Reproduced by kind permission BAA
The Framework freeviewer is now available for download via The Evidence page.
Explore the Pre-Monumental Landscape
We know that people were moving across the Heathrow landscape as long ago as 500,000 BC, the Palaeolithic period, but the evidence for this is amounts to only a handful of worked flints, a battered hand-axe and the bone of a bison preserved in an ancient river channel. By the seventh millennium BC the body of archaeological evidence has grown and we see a Mesolithic woodland landscape interrupted by occasional clearings.
Scatters of struck flints offer the main evidence for Mesolithic activity but we know that sometime during the seventh millennium BC groups of people gathered in a clearing alongside a small stream that flowed across the T5 site. Here they dug a cluster of shallow pits and deposited within them burnt stone and flints, flint tools, animal bones and plants and fruits. This activity may have marked the final act of ceremonies that brought families together to negotiate agreement over rights of way in the landscape, which provided access to the resources essential to everyday survival. The rituals also ensured that the meeting places took on a special meaning in the lives and memories of the inhabitants, giving the location an enduring significance.
Explore the Monumental Landscape
From the fifth millenium BC onwards our picture of human habitation changes. Flint tools are more common and pottery vessels make their first appearance. The vast tracts of woodland that covered the site were gradually cleared and controlled. A new architecture appeared in the landscape, with monuments constructed at important locations between the period 3,600 and 1,600 BC. These include the Stanwell Cursus, a linear construction of double ditches with a central bank that stretched for almost four kilometres. This massive monument sealed the ancient site of the Mesolithic pits. The Stanwell Cursus may have been a processional route for special ceremonies and may have also served as a barrier that divided the river floodplain from the upper gravel terraces. Whatever its function, the monument brought together the inhabitants of the Neolithic landscape, both as a building project and as a venue for communal activity in a place of ancient significance.
Smaller monuments, some linear, others designed as small, less visible enclosed spaces, were constructed during the Neolithic. These also were used for communal ceremonies, probably associated with solar events, such as the mid summer and mid winter solstices. The ceremonies would have brought family groups together as communities to negotiate ownership of land and the resources of a landscape which, by now was being tamed and divided. But these ceremonies were conducted by a small elite within the secret, sacred spaces of small enclosures, hidden from general view by high internal banks. Later in the Neolithic, the locations of these by now decaying monuments were used as venues for activities which left less obvious traces in the landscape. In this later period pits were dug and filled with pottery, flints and food during ceremonies that sealed agreements between the inhabitants and marked the importance of the place.
A 3D visualisation of how parts of T5 may have looked 10,000 years ago. Click to enlarge.
Explore the Enclosed Landscape
In the period between 2,000 BC and 1,000 BC the monumental Neolithic landscape was transformed to of one of agricultural production set within fields enclosed by boundaries marked by ditches, banks and hedges. Within the fields the Bronze Age inhabitants dug waterholes for their domesticated cattle and sheep and built small settlements that were approached by trackways running between fields and animal pens.
This pattern of fields and hamlets continued to develop throughout the Bronze Age, and the shape of the rural landscape of Heathrow at about 1000 BC would be somewhat familiar to us today. The development of an enclosed landscape containing settlements suggests that there was a major social and economic revolution in the way that ownership and access to resources linked the people and the land. The land and the communities became linked by ownership