We're here at Royal Oak Portal, at the west
end of the Crossrail route where the tunnel
enters London.
We're today because we've got a meeting with
the Natural History Museum to look at some
of the finds that have come up during Oxford
Archaeology's watching brief on the excavation
works here. Some of these finds are exceptionally
well preserved animal remains, clearly preserved
in an old river bed.
What we've done up until now is investigated
the section throughout the portal. Now in
this location when we're discovering animal
bones in quite some quantities, we've got
a smaller area marked out where we're doing
very careful sample excavation, taking 1 metre
square areas, taking samples for processing
back in the lab for even smaller remains -- shell
fragments, the remains of very small mammals
can help us to date these deposits very accurately.
We've called in the Natural History Museum
experts to come down and actually be with
us today to inspect the detail of the finds,
help us identify what species are present.
We've got Simon Parfitt here with us today
who is going to explain a little bit more
about the significance of this type of find.
I'm Simon Parfitt, from the Natural History
Museum, University College London and I'm
a vertibrate paleontologist, so I study animal
bones.
A few days ago I got a phone call basically
saying that animal bones had been discovered
in these deposits. This is really exciting
because it's an area that we know very little
about.
We know that the Thames flowed through this
area, but there are no records of animal bones
or human activity from this precise spot.
So this is a very interesting, very exciting
discovery.
This is a limb bone, possibly from the fore-limb
and some of these marks, which you can barely
see -- these very fine traces are intriguing.
They might well be natural, but there's a
possibility that they could be an indication,
a trace of very early human activity.
Some of these animal fossils quite often show
cut marks, or other forms of evidence that
man was here in the pleistoscene, paleolithic
period. This is a very rare find for a project
like Crossrail and it's one of the few sites
that we expect this type of find.
We've got a crucial requirement here to finish
this work quickly and efficiently. This is
the launching area for the first TBM on Crossrail
which is due in a few months time. So we're
working flat out with Oxford Archaeology and
our specialists to ensure we get this work
complete well on time and within the programme
that we've arranged with the project manager
here.
