When the Sutton Hoo artifacts were discovered, they instantly changed historians’ image of the era once called the Dark Ages. The opulent finds, made of materials ranging from iron to gold, bone, garnet, and feathers, included a human-faced helmet, delicately tooled shoulder clasps, household goods, and weapons-many with links to far-flung places like Syria and Sri Lanka. Over a series of excavations, Brown slowly unearthed 263 precious objects buried in the 80-foot-long Anglo-Saxon ship. The Sutton Hoo cache was unearthed by Basil Brown, an untrained excavator hired by landowner Edith Pretty, who was curious about what lay beneath the barrows on her Suffolk property near the River Deben. In early medieval Europe, people were rarely buried without at least some of the things they held dear, from beads to coins, horse harnesses, and more. “Humans had been burying people in ships for centuries and millennia,” says Brunning. Within a century of Sutton Hoo, most English burials contained little more than decaying bodies. But in the early seventh century A.D., when the last spade of dirt was tossed over the Anglo-Saxon warrior and his treasures, the practice of burying the dead with piles of bling was falling out of fashion.
HELM OF RAEDWALD. MOVIE
Photograph via Netflix/Entertainment Pictures, AlamyĮighty-two years later, the Sutton Hoo ship burial is back in the public eye thanks to The Dig, a new Netflix movie starring Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, and Lily James. The film The Dig retells the story of the Sutton Hoo excavation from the perspectives of landowner Edith Pretty (played by Carey Mulligan) and archaeologist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes).