by Matthew Cobb
One of the people I have ended up following on Tw*tter is Nicola White, who is a mudlark and posts as @TideLineArt. That is, she goes down onto the banks of the Thames, which is tidal, and rummages about for what she can find from past times. Sometimes she tw**ts strange badges, or fragments of pottery, which she asks readers to identify or translate. She reunites messages in a bottle with their senders. You can see her website here and you can buy some of her mudlarked creations on Etsy.
Nicola also regularly posts photos like this one, inviting readers to identify what on earth she has found. As you can see – this is almost as difficult as the spot-the-nightjar pictures we have posted here. She says ‘You’ll have to be sharp to find this one’, which could be a clue. NB It’s not a nightjar. Click twice to embiggen. Post your spots below.
There is a twisted bit of metal just right of upper center? Maybe that. The cable below and right of center is obvious so not that.
Razor!
Yep.
Ditto.
Oh, is that what it was? Guess it was too rusty for me.
I see a shaving razor and a top broken off a a glass bottle. I also see what could be fossils.
Oh, now I see two shards of possibly pottery or a ceremonial mask of a sort. The pieces look like they match up. They’re in the foreground, near all that white-ish stuff.
I only got three things. The cable, rusted metal washer, and some kind of metal ring.
I make my living as an archaeologist, so you’d think i’d be in with a chance, but it’s pretty hard from a photo; i hope i’d be better in real life.
There’s a big iron nail (mediaeval?)near the chalk cobble at the bottom of the photo, a few things that look like washers, or maybe could be roves from shipbuilding, and some other nice pebbles.
One of the main ways to find stuff in archaeology is to pick up and look at almost everything. In my early days i threw away what i thought was an old teacup handle. Luckily my supervisor retrieved it and carefully explained to me that it was part of a Roman glass bangle….
Yes I see the big old nail. Also straight up above that is a large triangular rock and just above that is a straight rod, similar in length to the nail. No idea what that is.
Also the rings that other people see.
Look more closely at the left hand end of the rod.
The razor? But that’s modern tat! I was looking for old stuff!
🙂
I’m wondering if the nails could be from a coffin.
“roves”? Loos likely to be my new word for the day. I’m guessing they’re the discs used to spread the load of a nail’s hed on the wood, but … [google “define:rove”]
Actually, when I’ve sseen them before, they’ve typically been square-ish.
i was trying to show what a clever-clogs i was!
🙂
(though i thought it might be a fair guess for something on a river bank)
All the ones i’ve seen have been more diamond-shaped,where they’ve been made from a long strip of flat iron; there must be some way in which making them like that must be more efficient in some way than square ones.
Yeah, I’ve seen lots of those rhomboid plate ones. I’d long-since worked out how and why they’re made – strip of plate ; pair of bench mounted shears (or mechanised equivalent) ; shear at an angle, which folds one or two corners down ; those corners dig into the wood to prevent the nail from rotating.
There is, of course, the other use of “rove” – a hank of threads. Which is still in use for the composite materials industry, when you’re laying up your fibrous material before impregnating it with the binder.
I think maybe diamond-shaped economises on material. If you make the load-spreader rectangular, the greatest bending moment is at the middle where the nail hole is. That means a rectangular washer will start to bend in the middle under maximum load. The diamond-shaped spreader, being widest in the middle, has most material where the greatest bending moment is.
I’m assuming the stress distribution on a wooden plank favours an elongated load spreader (something to do with the grain?). Otherwise, square (which is the most compact form of both diamond-shape and rectangle) is obviously the most economic shape that can be cut from strip.
cr
I see the safety razor. Surely that’s it.
Some nails…and is that a skull fragment to the immediate left of the large white stone at the bottom.
Please tell me it’s not an egg. I’d be sad if it were.
A rock with a hole drilled in it, possibly used for starting fires as part a fire drill, or used as part of a hand drill. It’s by the washer.
It looks to be exactly the size for mans hand.
That would certainly be cool. I’d assumed it was a hole made by one of those clams that burrows into soft rock.
I actually think your right, it’s probably naturally occurring.
I’m just guessing it’s human caused because all I see is rocks, trash and brick pieces. I also keep seeing the top of a skull, but I’m pretty sure that’s just pareidolia. The eye sockets look too close together with no space for a nose, but once I noticed it I can’t stop seeing it.
The fire-starter stone gets my vote.
I spotted that too. “Charlie’s” suggestion of a Teredo (or similar) is far more likely.
With a place like the Thames, one of the things you have to be careful of is the fact that ships often discharge ballast there. Which, if they’ve got nothing of even modest value to discharge on their voyage to London, would have been anything of minimal cost at their home port. Typically, that’s stone or building rubble. This isn’t much of a problem for the Thames, as pretty much anything, particularly archaeological, is plausible to have been carried here on foot before the Channel formed. But for East-coast America it’s something to watch out for. A 500,000 year old human-formed stone tool on the other hand may be something transported inadvertently in shipping ballast. This is what the archaeological term “out of context” means.
I’m now trying to remember if the Channel formed as part of the Storegga Tsunami event. It was about that time, but I can’t remember if the two have been conclusively associated.
A couple of washers, a bent nail, a bit of twisted wire … junk.
People are seeing the two possibly iron rings. Right next to the lower ring is a braided piece of straight wire.
Stone axe, v sharp indeed, in the centre of the photo. Flaked, so not neolithic.
There are a lot of stones. (ouch! Sorry)
Also several washers. I wonder if the eye is ‘trained’ to spot circular ring-like things, or is it just amateur mechanics with litter-covered garage floors?
There’s a very pointy stone or rock (middle of pic), which is probably a broken piece of earthenware pipe or similar. Just below and left is a square ‘stone’ which is also probably a broken piece of something artificial, and touching the right hand side of that is what looks like a ‘find’, a cast iron component of something. That’s my nomination.
cr
There’s an odd purplish-red object on the right side just above and to the right of the end of the large cable. Broken pottery maybe?
That looks to me like the top of a bottle and possibly glass.
I used to live in a little river town on the Mississippi- there was a spot on the river that apparently was a dumping point years ago. Whenever the river would go up, then back down rapidly, you could go down there and find old canning and medicine jars bobbing up and down at the edge of the water; the beach, for about a hundred feet, was littered with broken pieces of old crock pots. Fun! It wasn’t unusual to find a couple of five-gallon buckets full of bottles.
A rusted Ring of Power from the Lord of the Rings? 😉
I see what appears to be a fossil shark tooth just left of center, and about 1/3 down from the top.
I don’t see what you mention, but it’s not impossible. The “London Clay” is of an age, approximately, with the big Megalodon sharks. I can’t remember if such teeth have been founf in Britain, but I wouldn’t fall off my chair in astonishment at such a report.
In fact, http://www.discoveringfossils.co.uk/walton_on_naze_fossils.htm describes them as being (relatively) common, just along the coast from London.
I see that, just to the right and slightly above a flat trapezium-shaped stone. As a Gravel Inspector, you need to try harder, Aidan 😉
Well I do see two possible pieces of pottery / bottle tops. Hard to give coords, but using the large triangular stone one is up a ways, at about 11:00 of that, between a red rock & a rectangular rock. The other is at 3:00 of the triangular rock, nearish the right side.
Fossil footprint of a bear-type animal on the liver-shaped gray rock in the lower 1/3.
Also, cable from a bridge, badly carved lamb’s head, razor, and a penguin.
And next to the pawprint, a ghost in a “YEE-HAW!!!” gesture.
I see an ‘arrowhead’, gray with sight greenish tinge, about 30% from bottom to top,about 30% from left to right. This is probably the ‘stone axe’ seen by Michelle Bisselle.
Sorry to be off-topic but Boulez and Bowie within a week . . . too much
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2015/03/david-bowie-is-pierre-boulez.html
I see a fossilized portion of of a tibia and fibula.
To locate: Find the razor and go straight left half way to the left edge of the picture, slightly up and to the left of a white ovalish rock or coral piece.
I thought that was the “wish” half of a wishbone.
If anyone spots a cricket bat then I claim its a fake.
Seriously though, I thought I spotted a worked flint, roughly triangular that might be a hand axe.
about 1/3 down and 3/4 to the right a long metal object twisted at the left end flat in the middle and the right looks like one of those nasty sharp pointed scrapers that dental hygienists use to torture people. No idea what the name of the object is. just below a round grey stone and near one of the washers
There is also a lump of green glass, jade or volcanic glass on the chalk area. It’s shaped triangular. It appears to be part of an animals head, perhaps a horse?
There’s an old fashioned double sided razor-the kind that opens up to drop a new razor blade in.
Given the clue, it must be the razor we’re looking for. As for many of the rest, in the words of Steven Stills, “Pareidolia strikes deep”. I may be paraphrasing.
Matthew,
Are you going to post an update to this? I will be very disappointed if the “find” is something as mundane as a safety razor unless it has been shown to be a very early example (1890s-1910) which I doubt. Based upon looking at the mudlark’s site, Nicola has fairly high standards for what she considers a significant find.
Never mind… I looked at her twitter and saw the “find” has been exposed – I am sorely disappointed.