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SUTTON HOO - My Buried History

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Bianca
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« on: January 13, 2008, 07:36:38 am »







In June 1938, Basil Brown started work at Sutton Hoo, assisted by a gamekeeper and a gardener from the estate. Over the next two months they excavated three of the mounds. All, it transpired, had been robbed – probably at some point during the 16th or 17th centuries. They did, however, find a gilt bronze disc that suggested the mounds were much older than had first been thought: Anglo-Saxon rather than Viking.

Next May, Brown was back again, this time excavating the largest of the mounds. He started off, as he’d done before, by driving a four-foot wide trench into the middle of the mound. At around midday on 11 May, one of the men gave a shout: ‘Here’s a bit of iron!’ Immediately, Brown ordered work to be halted and began scraping about with his trowel.

Soon he found five more pieces of rusted iron beneath pinky-coloured discolourations in the soil. Brown deduced – rightly as it turned out – that these pieces of metal were rivets and that what they had uncovered was the remains of a boat.

The actual wood had decayed long ago, but what remained was a thin crust, rather like a photographic negative imprinted on the sandy soil. When they uncovered more rivets, the outline of the planks could clearly be seen, stretching off into the depths of the mound.

Brown moved into nearby lodgings and for the next month the three men kept digging. As they did so, the ship got bigger and bigger. Previously, the largest ever buried ship had been found in Norway. That had been around 70ft long.

The Sutton Hoo ship, it became clear, was much larger. It was, Brown acknowledged to his wife in one of his daily letters to her, the find of a lifetime. And that wasn’t all. As far as he could tell, the mound had never been robbed. If that was the case, it was possible that there was still an intact treasure chamber in the middle of the ship.

But unbeknown to him, trouble was stirring. Word had got out about the discovery. In Cambridge, the formidably bluff and bellicose Charles Phillips, Fellow of Selwyn College and an expert in Anglo-Saxon archaeology, was especially intrigued. On 6 June, Phillips paid his first visit to Sutton Hoo.

What he saw left him stunned.‘I was not prepared for the astonishing sight which met me,’ he wrote later. ‘At a quick estimate the boat could hardly be much less than one hundred feet long.’

It now seems clear that Phillips began lobbying to have Basil Brown removed so that he could take charge of the dig himself. Plainly ego played a big part in this, although there were other factors – the imminence of war, in particular.

Phillips felt – with some justification – that a discovery of this importance could not be left to two estate workers and a man with no formal training in archaeology. If there was to be a war, it was imperative that the excavation be finished and any finds taken away for safe keeping before hostilities commenced.

A number of meetings were held between representatives of the British Museum, Ipswich Museum and the Ministry of Works to try to work out what should happen next. They did not go at all well. Afterwards, the president of Ipswich Museum referred to Charles Phillips as ‘overriding, bumptious and tactless – a typical product of modern Cambridge’.

In June, the British Museum told Basil Brown to stop excavating. However, he took no notice and carried on. Soon he found what he believed to be the remains of a roof that had once sat on top of the treasure chamber.

Then, on the evening of 14 June, he uncovered a large iron ring. Using a soft brush, he cleared away more of the sandy soil, finding some green-coloured bronze objects and a piece of extremely decayed wood.

He had discovered what appeared to be the remains of a cauldron. When he tapped the piece of wood with his finger, it gave out a hollow sound. ‘This may only contain bones, but I shall see very soon now,’ he wrote to his wife.

But before he could go any further, the British Museum announced that Charles Phillips would be taking charge of the excavation. Basil Brown’s dream of exploring the treasure chamber was dashed just as he was on the brink of fulfilling it. Subsequently, he was relegated to carting away earth in a wheelbarrow and he seldom set foot inside the ship again.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2008, 06:21:14 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.


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