倫敦挖出兩千年前古代市場證據

　　6月8日BBC聽力：倫敦挖出兩千年前古代市場證據

　　London is one of the busiest financial centers of themodern world. And historians have revealedevidence that two thousand years ago, businessdeals were being struck on exactly the same spot.Archeologists have unearthed the oldest handwrittendocuments ever found in Britain. And perhaps fittingme for the financial district, they include receipts for copious amounts of beer. Sophie Jackson,project manager for Museum of London Archeology told Rebecca Caspi more.

　　Well, we found all the tablets on an excavation that we were doing right in the center of the cityof London, one of the richest archeological areas in Britain. And as we dug down, we weredigging through essentially what was a Roman river valley. And we started finding these littlefragments of wood. There are little fragments of notes of memos, essentially Roman memos,contracts. And there are some documents which are almost like e-mails that sort of peoplechatting to each other backwards and forwards. So there’s one where one Roman is telling thatthe people are boasting in the market that he’s done a really dodgy investment. But he can’t doanything about it cuz he will appear shabby.

　　Well, that may be the first message of that sort in the city of London, I’m sure, and certainlynot the last. But, but how did they manage to survive so long because we are talking abouttwo thousand years ago really, aren’t we?

　　The reason they’ve survived is cuz they are in this lovely boggy wet, essentially back field riverchannel really. And the water in the channel keeps the oxygen out, preserves all sorts oforganic materials that normally decay. So it’s really the exceptional preservation conditionson the site that means we have these tablets.

　　And what does it tell us about these early Londoners? And what do we already know aboutwhat London was like as a town back then?

　　Well, what’s really exciting about the tablets is that they’re very early. We think London wasfounded quite soon after the invasion, possibly 46 or 48. There’s been a lot of debate aboutwhat the character of the town looked like in those early years. What these tablets tell us is itwas absolutely full of businessmen really. Yes, there’s evidences of military, as well. But youknow, it’s obviously the town that setting up really really quickly. We even have information onpretrial hearings and people being caught. You know, there’re magistrates in place. We foundthese legal documents where they are actually almost like templates for writing contracts. Therewere spaces on these writing tablets for people to write their signatures, to press their seals in.I mean, it was all fantastically organized.

　　So in terms of the practicalities, would they be sort of scratching these messages directly ontothe Word or how would they do it?

　　No.

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