SUTTON HOO

Sutton Hoo is the name given to a small group of at least eighteen burial mounds located on a terrace 30 meters above the River Deben in Suffolk, southeastern England. It is interpreted as a burial ground for the pagan leaders of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of East Anglia, established in the early years of the seventh century A.D. as a reaction to the Christian missions to Kent.

Sutton Hoo was first investigated in 1938 at the behest of the landowner, Edith May Pretty, by a local archaeologist, Basil Brown, who trenched mounds 2, 3, and 4 discovering that each had been dug earlier and inferring their Anglo-Saxon date from scraps of metal. In 1939 Brown returned at Mrs. Pretty's invitation and dug a large trench through mound 1, where he defined a ship some 27 meters long with a collapsed burial chamber at its center. A team of experienced archaeologists led by Charles Phillips of Cambridge University was assembled hastily; this group recovered 267 parts of artifacts made of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, textile, and fur—together constituting the richest grave ever excavated in Britain.

The study of the find (between 1945 and 1975) by Rupert Bruce-Mitford of the British Museum included a second field campaign from 1965 to 1971, which completed the excavation of mound 1, confirmed the existence of mound 5, and endorsed the presence of an earlier prehistoric settlement, reported by Brown. In 1983 the Society of Antiquaries of London, in partnership with the British Museum, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the Suffolk County Council, launched a third campaign. The field team led by Martin Carver of the University of York excavated one fourth of the 4-hectare cemetery, mapped 10 hectares of its surroundings, and surveyed 10 square kilometers of the River Deben. In 1998 the site and its surrounding estates were given into the hands of the National Trust to be cared for in perpetuity, and a visitor center was constructed and opened in 2002.

The third campaign offered a new account of the character, date, and purpose of the Sutton Hoo cemetery. Use of the site had begun in the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age (c. 2000 B.C.), when the land was divided into agricultural units. The production of grain then alternated with stock-breeding—a pattern typical of agriculture of the Breckland region (an ancient heath), which continues to the present day. The Anglo-Saxons inherited a landscape of earthworks of Iron Age fields bounded by tracks leading inland from the river. The earliest Anglo-Saxon burials in the area are located near Tranmer House, the site of the visitor center; they date to the sixth century and include cremations, one of which is contained in a bronze bowl placed in the center of small ring ditches.

The Sutton Hoo cemetery itself was a new venture, which began around A.D. 600 about 500 meters farther south. The first burials were cremations in bronze bowls, accompanied by gaming pieces and cremated horses, sheep, cattle, and pigs, placed in pits beneath mounds about 10–15 meters in diameter, laid out in a line (mounds 5, 6, and 7). These burials had been much disturbed by later excavators, but they appear to be the memorials of young men, at least one of whom had blade injuries. The next burial is thought to be mound 17, where a young man was laid in a tree-trunk coffin in about A.D. 610, accompanied by a sword with a horn handle, two spears, a shield, a bucket, a cauldron, and a haversack containing lamb chops. At the head of the coffin was deposited a bridle, saddle, and body harness equipped with silver pendants and gilt bronze roundels, pendants, and strap ends. A stallion was buried in an adjacent pit and is assumed to have lain beneath the same mound.

Two ship burials were added to the cemetery in about A.D. 625. In mound 2 a ship about 20 meters long had been placed over the top of a chamber grave (2 × 6 × 2 meters deep). The person memorialized, probably a man, had lain in the chamber accompanied by a sword, shield, five knives, a cauldron, an ironbound tub, a blue glass jar, and drinking horns. Robbers and excavators had visited the grave at least three times, and the assemblage therefore had to be inferred from scraps and a chemical plot of the chamber floor.

In mound 1 the ship first found by Basil Brown had been positioned in a large trench, and a timber chamber 5.5 by 3 meters had been erected amidships. The dead man probably originally lay in a large tree-trunk coffin (although this theory remains the subject of controversy) with a pile of garments, shoes, and toilet items at his feet. Above him (perhaps on the coffin lid) were items of personal regalia with drinking horns, maple-wood and burr-wood bottles, and a large Byzantine silver dish probably carrying food. The regalia included a sword, a decorated purse, and two shoulder clasps, all made of solid gold inlaid with garnets imported from western Asia, and an iron helmet with bronze zoomorphic decoration. Toward the western end were stacked spears and an iron stand interpreted as a standard or a weapon stand, along with a decorated whetstone, interpreted as imitating an imperial scepter. Three large cauldrons, one with an ornamental iron chain 3.45 meters long, dominated the eastern end.

After these ship burials, burial continued intermittently at the site during the later part of the seventh century. The chamber grave of a woman, subsequently pillaged, originally was furnished richly with silver adornments, including a chatelaine, the symbolic key of a woman of high rank (mound 14), and two graves of adolescents were accompanied by a knife and a chatelaine, respectively.

In the late seventh or early eighth century the Sutton Hoo cemetery was adopted as a place of execution. Sixteen graves were found around mound 5 and another twenty-three on the eastern edge of the burial mounds, surrounding the site of a tree that was replaced by a post-construction probably representing a gallows. Some of the bodies of the execution victims had had their hands or feet tied, and others had been deposited face down, kneeling, or crouching. Radiocarbon dating suggests that capital punishment was practiced at Sutton Hoo from about A.D. 700 to A.D. 1000, at which point map evidence indicates that the gallows apparently was removed to the site of the new bridge across the Deben, constructed 2 kilometers north. The site then was abandoned, apart from sporadic attention from farmers and warreners, until the sixteenth century, when it was heavily plowed and the majority of mounds robbed by means of a shaft driven from the top. Most mounds were again trenched in 1860; only mounds 1 and 17 were spared.

After the discoveries of 1939 the site was interpreted as the likely burial ground of the kings of East Anglia, the territory in which it lay. The occupant of mound 1 was held to be Redwald, who, according to the Venerable Bede, an English historian of the early eighth century, was a major figure in England up to his death in about A.D. 625. The most recent excavation campaign has broadened this interpretation, showing that Sutton Hoo was part of a general reaction to Christianization, in which pagan Scandinavian practices, such as cremation in bronze bowls and ship burial, were signaled. The making of the mound 1 ship burial itself has been reinterpreted by Carver as a multilayered "composition" in which allusions to contemporary politics are gathered with the aim of declaring ideological alliance with Scandinavia against the Christian Continent. In this sense, the great ship burial is a dramatic statement comparable to the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, which describes the deeds and deaths of fifth- to seventh-century heroes, including burial in a ship. The pagan alliance failed around the end of the seventh century, at which point the burial ground of pagan kings became a place where the new Christian leaders disposed of dissidents.

SUTTON HOO

BIBLIOGRAPHY