2021-03-09 Catherine Hills - The Real Sutton Hoo

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Title: The Real Sutton Hoo: Digging into "The Dig" with Dr. Catherine Hills (University of Cambridge, UK)
Sponsor: The Archaeological Research Facility
About: Sutton Hoo is near Woodbridge in Suffolk, near the east coast of England. It is the site of burials dating to the later sixth and early seventh century AD. One burial mound produced a spectacular burial, in a ship with lavish grave goods. The discovery of this burial in 1939 has received renewed public interest this year because it is the subject of the 2021 film “The Dig”.
www.netflix.com/watch/81167887
How much of the story told in the film is true? What is the significance of the find? This lecture will review the history of investigations, from the sixteenth century to the present day, and put the finds in the wider context of early medieval England and beyond. Several recent discoveries have added to our picture of this period: the Staffordshire Hoard, the Prittlewell burial and the site at Rendlesham, a few miles away, recorded by Bede as the home of Raedwald, king of East Anglia, who may have been buried at Sutton Hoo. Brief accounts of these will be included, showing how they relate to Sutton Hoo in this very active field of research into early medieval England.
About the speaker: Dr. Catherine Hills is a Fellow emerita of Newnham College and a Senior Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, both at Cambridge University.

[@ucb_arf]

Here are some responses from Dr. Hills to questions that viewers asked in the chat box during the talk:
Q: Could the Staffordshire hoard be stuff that was stolen from one of the pilfered mounds at Sutton Hoo?
A: Chris Fern's analysis suggested it contained material from more than one workshop, some probably from the same workshop as that which produced some of the items in the Mound 1 treasure. Some of the Staffordshire hoard could have belonged to people who ended up buried at Sutton Hoo- if not left dead on a battlefield in Mercia. But the things are most likely to have been taken from them in 7th century, either when dead in battle or as tribute, wergild etc. The pits were dug into the mounds much later, a thousand years later in fact. It is unlikely that a 16th/17th century treasure hunter would NOT have melted down their finds, taking them as broken objects all the way to the midlands seems very improbable. Another way something dug up at Sutton Hoo could have ended up in the Staffordshire hoard is if you follow the scenario that this was a recently buried deposit, including material which had been in a collection elsewhere or from undetected recent looting episodes at Sutton Hoo- for which there is no evidence. Again, why take it all the way to Midlands and mix it with stuff from elsewhere, possibly Kent and Northumbria? Most people agree this was an ancient deposit- though there are still unanswered questions about how, why and when it ended up there. The dismantling of the artefacts, taking sword hilts off blades, was done with metalworker’s tools- maybe some of the craftsmen who had made these wonderful things then had to destroy them.
Q: A lot of the designs on the excavated material looked very Celtic. Did Celtic art persist in a great degree into the Anglo-Saxon 7th century?
A: Only a few designs at Sutton Hoo are "Celtic", mainly the hanging bowl escutcheons. It is worth remembering that what we now often see as "Celtic" often derives from images in manuscripts like Durrow and Lindisfarne which incorporate Classical, Celtic and Germanic images - hence the interlaced Germanic animals on the book of Durrow which also has Celtic scroll patterns and classical interlace.
Amongst the many early Anglo-Saxon objects from graves apart from Sutton Hoo there are a few things which use red enamel, which has been seen as a "Celtic" technique (even that isn't undoubted). Otherwise it really is the hanging bowls- of which there are about 150 examples of bowls or in many cases just fittings. Otherwise there isn't really much trace in most early A-S metalwork, but later manuscript and sculpture art does have an intriguing blend of the three three traditions, Classical, Germanic and Celtic, recreated into characteristic early medieval insular art (there is continuing debate as to the relative contributions of craftsmen and clerics in different parts of Britain and Ireland). The hanging bowls and manuscripts do show there was a continuing thread of "Celtic" ie non-Roman, non-Germanic artistic techniques and designs linking pre-Roman Iron Age /Romano-British with 7th-8th century, but not otherwise very visible in 6th-early 7th century Anglo-Saxon metalwork.
At Sutton Hoo hanging bowls form part of a mix of objects from far and wide as well as local- eg Byzantine bowls and spoons, Frankish coins. The large hanging bowl was not new when buried, it was mended with a silver patch in form of beaked heads.
Q: I'm wondering whether the episode with Basil almost buried under the collapsed mound was real or another dramatic twist adding to the life and death theme (quite fittingly).
A: There were several collapses during the excavations in both 1938 and 1939, recorded in a quite matter of fact way in Basil’s diary. None involved
Edith Pretty digging him out. For example: 2nd July 1938 "six feet down Fuller and Sawyer (workmen) were nearly buried"; 22 July 1938 "a landslide held up matters for a time…it was not however serious"; 28 July 1938 "some landslides". In 1939 there were also quite a few mentions of landslides while digging Mound 1: 19th May 1939 "the cutting has now been widened .. even that is not sufficient to prevent landslides owing to the nature of the soil (sand)". The most dramatic reference was Tuesday 30 May "I only escaped being buried by a large landslide of 10 tons or more, missing me by a few minutes"; on 1st June "another heavy landslide". So the film makers created that story on the basis of real collapses and near burials.
Q: What's happened with the Ipswich Museum and its role in this?
A: Ipswich museum has the finds from the 1938 excavations. They had been promised an exhibition of the Mound 1 finds but the war intervened, I think all they had was some replicas. But they have other Anglo-Saxon and medieval finds from Ipswich. Guy Maynard retired as curator in 1952- but lived to be 90. He and Charles Phillips remained on bad terms for the rest of their lives, Phillips wrote to Basil I think about a possible visit to Ipswich saying he wanted to avoid meeting Maynard. Reid Moir, the president of the Museum committee, died in 1944. The tension went back before Sutton Hoo- Reid Moir and Maynard had been displaced in the takeover of the Prehistoric society of East Anglia by Grahame Clarke and other (then) young archaeologists, including Charles Phillips.

[@helenritchey4337]

It was the movie, “The Dig”, that inspired me to learn more about Sutton Hoo and other archaeological discoveries in England (or Britain?). This presentation is interesting! Thank you ☺️