Discover the 14,000 Ancient Roman Artifacts Just Donated to the London Museum
Among the items are sandals, pottery and Britain’s largest collection of Roman writing tablets, bearing IOU notes and gossip in stunningly well-preserved wax
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London is a city of layers, where shining skyscrapers are built atop some of the city’s oldest ancient sites. Recent excavations, such as a Roman basilica unearthed in London’s financial district, exemplify the city’s rich history.
For many years, however, there were few protocols for the preservation or proper excavation of artifacts. “We used to have to beg to get on site,” Sophie Jackson, an archaeologist at the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), tells the Guardian’s Zoe Williams.
But things have changed, as companies that once saw archaeological sites as hindrances have begun to embrace discoveries beneath the footprints of their soaring office towers.
One of those companies is Bloomberg, a financial media firm that commissioned archaeologists from MOLA to excavate beneath the site of its new European headquarters in London between 2012 and 2014. They found tens of thousands of well-reserved Roman artifacts.
Now, 14,000 of those finds—along with a roughly $26 million donation—are heading to the London Museum, a revitalized collection of the city’s rich past poised to open a new flagship location in 2026, according to a statement. Many of them will be on public view for the first time ever.
Sharon Ament, the museum’s director, calls Bloomberg’s donation “a momentous gift that ties the past to the future and which will be a lasting legacy for London,” per the statement.
Aside from the money, which is set to help the London Museum transform a Victorian-era meat market into its new exhibition space, the collection of Roman artifacts is the largest donation of archaeological material the museum has ever received.
The site where the artifacts were discovered was a third-century C.E. temple dedicated to Mithras, a deity who gained cult-like worship in the Roman Empire.
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In the 1950s, when the temple in central London was first unearthed, it garnered widespread attention, with curious onlookers lining up for blocks to see the ancient history beneath their feet.
However, the archaeological methods at the time were “pretty haphazard,” per the Guardian. Workers would simply take artifacts out of the ground and hand them over to their superiors with little regard for provenance or preservation.
For decades, the site was only partially excavated, for fear that further digging would disturb a nearby church built by famed architect Christopher Wren.
“We knew that in the layer underneath, that they hadn’t dug into, a lot of material would have survived,” Jackson tells the Guardian. The site was especially fortunate to be near the waterlogged course of the Walbrook, a lost underground river whose muddy conditions helped protect organic materials from decay.
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When Bloomberg took over the site in the 2010s, archaeologists finally had a chance to tap into that layer with modern excavation methods. The results were stunning.
Among the well-preserved finds now heading to the London Museum are leather goods, jewelry, ceramics, pottery, animal bones and around 750 pairs of shoes from the first century C.E.
The collection also features 400 writing tablets—wooden frames surrounding black wax that carried messages, notes and business transactions. Dated to between 50 and 80 C.E., the tablets are among the earliest examples of Roman cursive, a style of handwriting, discovered in Britain, per Artnet’s Richard Whiddington.
One tablet, for instance, dated to 57 C.E., was a financial document. “They were amazing bureaucrats, the Romans,” Jackson tells the Guardian. “And it’s nice for Bloomberg, isn’t it?”
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Other tablets contained key information about citizens of Roman London, including previously unknown names and social gossip.
The archaeologists also recovered about 70,000 pieces of Roman pottery, including imports from Gaul that hint at London’s role as a business hub. Other pieces are decorated with cult symbols for the worship of Mithras, who was known for his ritual slaying of a bull.
Animal bones, which bear the trace of “every tool mark, every nick made by a butcher’s knife,” also provide new insights into the agricultural and culinary practices of ancient London, Alan Pipe, an archaeologist at MOLA, tells the Guardian.
When the London Museum opens next year, it will have more than seven million objects in its collections, according to the Art Newspaper’s Gareth Harris, making it one of the largest archaeological archives on the planet.
