Given the inherent drama of the excavations at Sutton Hoo, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood offered its own take on the events. The quality and quantity of the artifacts found inside the burial chamber were of such technical artistry that it changed our understanding of this period.” “A time that had been seen as being backward was illuminated as cultured and sophisticated.
“The discovery in 1939 changed our understanding of some of the first chapters of English history,” says Sue Brunning, a curator of early medieval European collections who oversees the British Museum’s Sutton Hoo artifacts. Contrary to long-held beliefs that the period was devoid of the arts or cultural richness, the Sutton Hoo artifacts reflected a vibrant, worldly society.īasil Brown (front) led excavations at Sutton Hoo. Not only did the site shed light on life during the early medieval Anglo-Saxon period (roughly 410 to 1066) but it also prompted historians to revise their thinking about the Dark Ages, the era that followed the Roman Empire’s departure from the British Isles in the early fifth century. The importance of the Sutton Hoo burial cannot be overstated. The British Museum, which houses the trove today, deemed the find a “spectacular funerary monument on epic scale.” Dating back to the sixth or seventh century A.D., the 1,400-year-old grave-believed to belong to an Anglo-Saxon king-contained fragments of an 88-foot-long ship (the original wood structure had deteriorated) and a burial chamber filled with hundreds of opulent treasures.
Over the next year or so, Brown, who was later joined by archaeologists from the British Museum, struck gold, unearthing the richest medieval burial ever found in Europe. (The name is derived from Old English: “Sut” combined with “tun” means “settlement,” and “hoh” translates to “shaped like a heel spur.”) After Pretty hired self-taught amateur archaeologist Basil Brown, the dig began the following spring. In the summer of 1937, as the specter of World War II loomed over Europe, Edith Pretty, a wealthy widow living near Woodbridge, a small town in Suffolk, England, met with the curator of a local museum to discuss excavating three mounds of land on the far side of her estate, Sutton Hoo.
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