 Welcome. I'm speaking to you from Berkeley, California, which sits on the ancestral and unceded land of the Chacheno-speaking Alone people. I respect the land itself and the people who have stewarded it throughout many generations, and I honor their elders past and present. I am speaking from Berkeley, California, and my name is Christine Hastorf, and I'm the director of the Archeological Research Facility. The Archeological Research Facility is a research unit at the University of California Berkeley campus, supporting and promoting archaeological research across the campus and into the community. It hosts lecture series, workshops, and laboratories for archaeological research by all members, also funding faculty and graduate student research. We always have a project we are promoting, and currently we're raising funds to initiate a local summer field school for traditionally underrepresented students. If you're interested in supporting that, please give at our website listed here on the next slide. These sites link you to the UC Berkeley's annual online fundraising celebration, The Big Give Day, which is March 11th, just around the corner. This year, ARF is delighted to have two anonymous donors offering a three-to-one match for donations of up to $10,000 for this program, this field school program. So on March 11th, please consider making an online donation that will be tripled in support of archaeology at UC Berkeley, and especially for this field and lab training program. So you can go to that link at the bottom that says support our programs. But we're all here today for a real treat. If, like me, you are at home a lot and relish a quiet film, we have had one in The Dig, which was inspired, has inspired ARF to host our guest today, Dr. Catherine Hills. Dr. Hills is a fellow emerita of Noonum College and a senior fellow of the Macdonald Institute for Archaeological Research, our sister unit at Cambridge University. Most of her academic career was as a senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology there at Cambridge. Her research and teaching have focused on the archaeology of the regions around the North Sea, especially Britain and Scandinavia. During the second half of the first millennium AD, the period when the Western Roman Empire disintegrated into the smaller territorial units, which became the medieval and modern states of Western Europe. Her major field project has been Spong Hill North El Elm in central Norfolk, a large early Anglo-Saxon cemetery, including 2500 cremations and 57 inhumations, dating to between the 5th and early 6th centuries AD, which was excavated in the 1970s. She has hosted several British TV series, including The Blood of British, of the British, and Down to Earth. She is currently the editor of the Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society. So she still remains very active in this time period. It is due to Dr. Hill's very significant knowledge and interest in the specific time period in region in England, where Sutton Who is located, the site at the center of the film, that allow us to welcome her to speak to the UC Berkeley community today about this very site, Sutton Who. The finds encountered there, the people involved in that find, as well as the neighboring sites that allow us to learn about the cultural milieu in those early medieval times. Before turning over the screen to Dr. Hill's, I want to mention that there will be some images of human remains in some of the slides today. Now I welcome Dr. Catherine Hill's and her presentation, The Real Sutton Who, which includes the history and archaeology of the site and the film that the dig was based on. So thank you very much Catherine Hill's and welcome. Well thank you very much Christine for that very kind introduction and thank you for inviting me to talk about Sutton Who, a site in which I have obviously long been very interested. I enjoyed the film, The Dig, and I'm quite glad to be inspired by it to go back and revisit what one might call the true story. So exactly what that means is another matter and very complicated and I liked a lot of things about the film. I thought it got some aspects of the site and the excavation very well and there are a few other things which one might query which may come up in my lecture but what I want to concentrate on really is actually the history of the site at Sutton Who and the things that were discovered there, how it was discovered, a sort of mini history of English archaeology really and the wider significance of some of the finds in terms of telling us all the site itself, in terms of telling us about what was going on in England, in the North Sea, in Europe as a whole in that period that Christine has mentioned when we were discovering, I don't know discovering, but the sort of disintegration of the Roman Empire and the emergence of what became all of the kingdoms and territories of Europe afterwards, Western Europe anyway. So I put on this slide because I think it actually illustrates something which was rather good in the film which is the nature of the Suffolk countryside particularly when it's quite close to the sea as it is here in this picture. I'm going to show you some maps in a minute don't worry so we'll indicate exactly where we are in geography but you know there's quite peaceful pleasant sort of landscape with a certain amount of water in it what you can see there is the river Deben and if you look right out to the cloudy bit at the back of the film of the picture that's where the North Sea is. In the foreground in the front are the mounds and this is what I'm mostly going to be talking about these are the burial mounds of Sutton Hoo. So next let's move on and show you where it actually is there you go there's a nice simple map and the point of this map is really to get us to remember that in the period I'm talking about slightly earlier than that 700 AD you see at the top there we haven't got big conglomerates we haven't got a huge empire anymore and we haven't got big kingdoms yet we haven't got England or France or Denmark or what have you we've got a lot of smaller units which are very approximately sketched out here and the one we're interested in is East Anglia which is here and Sutton Hoo is just a bit north of Ipswich so just to remind you of that sort of North Sea context there's Norway and Sweden and Denmark and Germany and the Netherlands Belgium France all of those places and here's the rest of Britain and Ireland is sneaking off the side there okay I've borrowed this map from a book by Nick Hyam and Martin Ryan because it is it enables me to show you the location of a few sites that I want to bring in at the end recent discoveries that have begun to tell us more or make us ask more questions about Sutton Hoo so here is Sutton Hoo itself and on this map it's extremely close to oh come back on this map it's extremely close to Rendlesham one of the places I shall mention I'll also talk about Prittlewell which isn't marked on here it's sort of underneath the H of Harrow on the hill on the Thames estuary the north side of the Thames estuary and over here somewhere like the D of Lichfield is where the Staffordshire Horde was discovered I think this map was drawn maybe before that was found I'm not sure so those I'm going to go right over there briefly right at the end to look at the Staffordshire Horde and a little bit down here but mostly what I'm talking about is this area and here is a rather larger version of Anglia Saks and East Anglia there we have Sutton Hoo and Rendlesham again and also Idfrich which really comes in at the at the very end at the time that Sutton Hoo is being important and I just put this on really to well repeat what Christine has always said about already said about my background in Anglia Saxon studies here is Spong Hill in the middle of Norfolk which was indeed a very large Anglia Saxon cemetery with 2500 unfortunately not all is perfectly preserved as these two which I rather like with chunks of flint on the top of them and decoration and so forth that's another story that I'm not telling today but just to say that obviously I've been interested in all of East Anglia and all of Anglia Saxon England to say nothing of all the surrounding areas of Europe right so now let's let's home in on on the site itself and these the mounds there are 17 mounds known since they've all been badly plowed it's possible that there were rather more of them that may yet one of these days be recovered but 17 that we know of and I want to use this slide just very briefly to outline the history of investigations into this site or damage to it whatever you like to say how you like to call it so the first record that we have is not actually a record it's in broken pottery um in the big mound the big mound here which is the one most people know about the mound one there was a big hole dug in it and at the bottom of it was a smashed pot which is a probably a late 16th early 17th century bellavine pot and when um Martin Carver who comes into this story later started his work in the 80s and in fact cleared the site so that it looks like this he um worked out the sequence of disturbances to the site so first of all we have large holes dug in practically all of the mounds unfortunately in something like late 16th 17th century various folklore attaches this to John Dee the astrologer or scientist of Queen Elizabeth's day but there's I don't think there's any real evidence but anyway it's nice to think that maybe he came there and dug a hole in mound one and left his picnic behind so unfortunately very probably a lot of the material from most of the mounds was dug up at this time and then later in the 19th century there's one newspaper record of it the cause of these dents here Rupert Bruce Mitford from the British Museum who dug here later was hopeful that this was where the ships inside all the mounds had sagged but unfortunately um I think Martin was conclusively demonstrated that what they are is 19th century trenches dug straight through um from one side to the other and since these trenches were probably the ones recorded in 1860 and 1860 is a time when a lot of archaeological interest is is around in in England I think if a lot of things have been found in those mounds at that time some of the news would have got out and some of the finds would probably have survived just up the coast at snake set to miss Davidson and some others excavated a large ship they they produced a plan of it and there was a record that had also been robbed earlier but that was recorded and talked about there was never anything about 19th century finds about sudden who so I'm afraid the conclusion probably is that it was the 16th for 17th century characters who actually took away most of the stuff out of most of the mounds which is rather disappointing they managed to miss two and they missed the big one which is great um because they were in the habit of digging in the middle of the mounds whopping great holes through the middle of the mounds find the treasure take it away probably melt it down never be seen again um and this mountain big one had had a medieval track had gone across one end of it I think it was that anyway part of one end of it had been dug away and so when they dug in the middle of their mound it actually missed the real middle and missed the treasure come back um they also missed a small mound which is not visible as a mound at all at the moment mound 17 because that one had two graves in it a young man and a horse and they dug a hole through the two of them so it's just possible that one or two other mounds here will prove to have been missed by the earlier robbers but it's not very hopeful really the most visible thing you can see here is the most recent of course which is a slip trench dug in about 1940 and one of the sad things about about the excavation was that after the thing finished in 1939 and World War two started the site was briefly used for tank practice because you can see you know you've got a tank you want humming hummicky things you can go up and down bonk bonk bonk so they went at this time that mound hadn't been reconstituted it was a sort of a big hole with two narrow things on either side absolutely fantastic for driving your tank up and down over so and they also dug trenches like this and they used and you know they didn't do it for too long because somebody knew about the site and stopped them and moved them on but they did do quite a lot of damage um so that's sort of the history the visible history of the site encapsulated in in what you can actually see surviving there okay so then we come to 1938 and these two characters and this is another of the things that's really quite good in the in the dig the two central characters are you know played by brilliant actors rather younger and more glamorous perhaps than the original characters who were both 50ish I think when when when the excavation took place but both interesting people in their different ways here is Edith Pritchie and she had well she had quite an interesting life her she her father was a wealthy Manchester um businessman he was into gasworks and in the first decade of the of the 20th century they the family seemed to travel indicatically they they went to Egypt several times they went they went around the world they went down the red sea to to India to one Japan to San Francisco and back again on another occasion they went to South Africa although that sadly was when her father died actually when they were traveling in South Africa on another occasion she went to Iceland I mean she you know constant travel and the details of the slow ships full of cockroaches and rats and how long it would have taken them to get there is extraordinary so she did that but she was also very much into charitable activities and other kinds of activities there's a rather exhausting list of all the organizations that she was head off or running up where they were living in Cheshire in the 1920s in the First World War she did train as a nurse and was nursing for I think in 18 and 19 but she only married Frank Pritchie who came from Ipswich when after her father had died in about 1926 and by that stage she was over 40 so she married Frank came down they bought the house at Sutton Hoo which was not it was quite a recent house at that stage built in 1910 and by all accounts they were they were pretty happy for several years it is said that Frank had asked her to marry him every year since she was 18 but she only gave in as I said 20 years later and then somewhat to everybody's astonishment I imagine she discovered she was pregnant aged 46 and had a son Robert and after that it said she was never in particularly good health and then very sadly a few years after that her husband Frank became ill and died of cancer quite young so by the time you get to 1937-1938 she's a quite lonely widow with a young son and not in therapy good health and rather interested in spiritualism and interested in making you know can she possibly contact the dead she's still actually acting there's all sorts of charitable activities and a magistrate she was one of the first if not the first woman magistrate JP so quite a forceful interesting woman and the Sutton Hoo episode is really at the end of her life at the end of the life which had been more interesting than the one might might realize and if we turn to Basil Brown Basil Brown was a local Suffolk man he comes from a small farming family in fact he tried to make a living as a farmer for quite a long time but partly he was more interested in other things like astronomy and archaeology and partly I think it was quite a tough time in the 1900s farming in East Anglia he left school aged 12 and ever afterwards was a voracious consumer of all sorts of literature and particularly as I say astronomy which comes into the film and archaeology you can see he's a bit less glamorous and fine but you know an interesting character and with strong views about things and with a kind of natural ability for some aspects of archaeology it is said well I'm sure his techniques of digging wouldn't stand up these days except for the one and only you know the magnificent uncovering of the ship which which was an achievement that would be you know you wouldn't make it better now I don't think so anyway Edith Pretty was interested in the mountains what is in these mountains in my garden curiosity and she got in touch with Guy Maynard at Ipswich Museum and he said okay I'll send you Basil Brown because by that time Basil had given up long given up farming and was existing various odd jobs but a lot of a lot of digging and particularly digging on behalf of Ipswich Museum he was the sort of local field archaeologists really but for Suffolk so he came along left Roman Villa that he was otherwise mostly digging and in the first year 1938 which is left out of the film the dig he looked into three burial mounds and discovered you know bits and pieces of stuff but also established as I've said earlier that all of them had been disturbed so then the next year which was 1939 they decided to go for mound one the big one let's go for for mound one and so he did indeed start digging mound one and let us see what happened and eventually he came to this perhaps perhaps this black and white picture this is the picture after it's all been excavated and uncovered and what you have to remember is that there's almost nothing there's no there's no wood left there's nothing organic left of that ship and there's not there's hardly any organic material left in the whole of the site because it's sandy everything everything's gone that's there's a wood or or leather or textile or human body or anything like that but what Basil knew from his previous the 1938 season had produced a number of of iron iron ship rivets and he read up the Snape excavation and looked at their plan and knew how you know how there were these rows and rows of ship rivets that outlined where a ship had been and so as soon as John Jacob one of the gardeners that Mrs. Pretty gave him to help on the excavation as soon as he said I've got this bit of iron Basil you know thought right this is it and he knew from the shape of it and that was probably what it was and so they excavated and you can see these rows and rows and rows these these things here are rows and rows and rows of very rusty old ship rivets and there's perhaps the better colored picture here and it's by following that by following the little rows of red rusty ship rivets set into sand that was a slightly darker brown than surrounding sand that you ended that they ended up with this ship it's it's really a fantastic achievement because that ship was not there but Basil found it so he was excavating with these two two gardeners and beginning to find the ship and the news got out partly from Guy Maynard in Ipswich sending inquiries up to the Isle of Man about the Viking ship burials and Charles Phillips heard of this from Cambridge he was a fellow at Selwyn a tutor in a history tutor actually and he came along and looked and took one look and sort of said oh my godfather's or something and after that a team was assembled of what you could call professional archaeologists I mean yes I mean the profession of archaeology is something that kind of evolved during the 20th century I suppose and you could say that Basil Brown given that he excavated and was paid for excavating was more of a professional than some of the others who did it as part of their other other careers anyway he just before I knew this this is this is what the poor old ship looked like just about a few days after war was declared in September back filled with bracken and left therefore terribly vulnerable to the tanks driving all over it and another point to make here is that this photo is by Mercy Lack now one of the things that people have picked up in the film is the invented entirely fictional cousin of Edith pretty who called something like Lomax who is who is a photographer who takes the photographs and has a lot of affair with with Peggy Pigott and he is totally fictional and doesn't exist at all the photographs of the site were mostly taken by members of the team and those of the ship were taken by Mercy Lack and Barbara Wagstaff to women photographers school teachers on their holidays who turned up just as the dig had got to this stage and took lots of fantastic pictures including these early color pictures this is this is their picture this is a 1939 photograph which is quite surprising given how little available color photography there was in those days okay so here we see the team assembled once once the outside world had discovered about the site and this team I'm so sorry that was my phone this team appeared of archaeologists who in those days were quite young but actually all at most of them ended up having long careers and long lives and becoming professors and so forth so here we actually see Mrs. Pritchie sitting in her chair and she is looking at Charles Phillips down there and there is a battle and you see he's looking quite small actually and I'm not sure who that is that one is goodness I think that's Stuart Pigott and here we've got Peggy Pigott you can't really see her properly and that's Grimes that's William Grimes that's Brailsford I think and I think that's Stuart again okay yes oh goodness Margaret Guido it says that was her name after she was married for the second time so they excavated all the fantastic finds and there were sort of various stories which they told afterwards they were staying down in the in the hotel in Woodbridge the nearest town in the bull and people saying oh are you finding you found anything tonight and and I think it was Grimes who had the great gold buckle in his pocket and he said oh yes yes my pockets are full of gold and of course it was true they really were full of gold but fortunately if you say it like that everybody thinks it's a joke so it's quite safe a good way of protecting it okay and here's this plan of all this amazing stuff which I'll show you better but that's to show what the plan looked like incidentally um Basil once they had brought all the they decided to assemble this team Basil was supposed to stop work um there he is in this picture here he didn't in fact and it's a very good thing given the timing of everything he but he did leave the burial chamber in the middle and he went around and he dug out the other end of the ship if he hadn't dug that done that we wouldn't have had the ship but um as it was there was the the burial chamber in the middle of the ship ready for these characters to come along and dig everything out like that and here's a much later reconstruction this is one of Martin Carver's reconstructions suggesting that the body was originally in a coffin with these things on top of it and other things piled around it and so forth there is room for argument about exactly well you know whether he was in a coffin or lying on a beer or what have you I mean this is quite a plausible reconstruction and it gives you some idea of the kind of stuff there is if when we get to a pretty well you can see one that's actually more or less survived in situ so you can see the kind of thing okay so they all went away and um one of the things that you don't get so much from the account of the excavation as you did from the film the dig was the the looming imminence of of world war two which it obviously was and that was one of things that constrained I think perhaps I'll just go back no I won't I'll stay here with this that was one of the things that constrained the the the sort of speed with which things happen the finds were packed up and taken to London and then after everything had been emptied out of the ship and all the diggers had gone away and Basil backfilled it with Bracken in August they had a coroner's inquest to decide the ownership of the treasure because it was it was a treasure and the at that time it's now changed there was a law an ancient medieval law still in use until the late 20th century called the law of treasure trove and the only way I can ever remember how that law actually operated was by thinking about southern whom because what it said was that if you found a horde of treasure buried in the ground you had to decide whether the person who buried it meant to come back for it but never did and if they did mean to come back for it then it actually belonged to the crown it belonged to the the government um and some people have suggested that might be because you wanted to it was a way of preventing tax evasion bury your treasure in the ground then you can't have it taken off you by the tax collectors I don't know about that but anyway that was that was that was one version the other idea the the alternative interpretation was that it had not been left with intent to recover it had been deposited in the ground given to the ground given to the dead person to take with them into the afterlife and in that case it belonged to the landowner um and so this the judgment was given by the coroner in august august 14th something like that in woodbridge and people quoted bairwolf and you know it was decreed pretty pretty clearly that nobody had intended to come back and take that stuff and that therefore it belonged to mrs pretty mrs edith pretty and the the story about tension between charles philip and um basal brown are not really fair um actually the the tension was between ipswitch museum and charles philips and the justifiable wish for the ipswitch museum people to get the treasure to have the treasure their suffer treasure which is you know it's never gone away that feeling that you know it's a suffer treasure interest day and suffer but probably edith was right and she probably decided independently though charles reckoned it was partly his idea and partly her spiritualist advisor but i think it was probably true that sending it up to london was the best thing to do so it went to the british museum and throughout the war it was kept safely and packed up in boxes in a disused underground with a lot of other things from the british museum after the war it became the task of rippert bruce mitford and here is rippert bruce mitford who was um curator of well by the time i met him in the 1970 about 1970 he was the curator of the medieval and later collections in the british museum and so it was his task and this is another key person here is angela evans so it was his task to write up the site and fully publish it that there'd been really a rather excellent preliminary publication in the journal antiquity in the winter of 1940 which i think was pretty impressive which actually outlined all the issues that everybody's argued and discussed ever since but anyway rippert and angela and a team of other people eventually produced enormous fantastic volumes three volumes except they're four because the third one was so fat it had to be divided into two and they're wonderfully illustrated with black and white photographs mostly not so many color and um also lots of discussion about technical aspects of the material and parallels it's it's not fair to say it's an art historical publication it's archaeology and art history but very much focusing on mound one and the finds particularly all aspects of them which of course have ever since been on display in the british museum now questions about the ship itself remained it has been probably beautifully recorded by commander hutterson who saw standing in that picture of mercy lax in 1939 but unfortunately his records were destroyed in the war i think he might even been killed in the war so his detailed records and drawings don't survive and there were quite a lot of things we still don't know about that ship and it indeed still argue about particularly whether it actually had a mast and therefore a sail that is an ongoing dispute which i won't enter into not being a marine archaeologist so anyway rippert thought that there should be further investigation i'm sure he's right he came back and they opened up the poor old ship and if you think back to what it looked like when mercy lack photographed it you can see it's a bit of a savage remnant but anyway they very carefully uncovered it excavated it took a plastic cast of it turned that plastic cast into a permanent and permanent and they did in sort of bits of quite a complicated technical thing different you know sort of sets and segments of it that walls flotted together but unfortunately i think because it was so warped and bashed it didn't answer a lot of the questions they wanted and i have no idea whether the British Museum still keeps the plastic cast of it somewhere the other thing they did was they sieved all the spoil tips and recovered some quite key little fragments that have been missed before and also took apart the mounds and what was left of the of the mound the ship had been buried in and excavated the prehistoric things underneath okay so that was the 1960s project and eventually then as i say these beautiful fat volumes came out in the 70s and let's just look quickly at some of the stuff here is the helmet and the scepter and the sword and the helmet and the scepter are the kind of thing that that well you were seeing pictures of them before and this the helmet turns up on the cover of practically every edition of Beowulf and every copy of a new book on an anglo-saxon England actually and together they they say possibly this is something to do with with authority with power it's it's one of the reasons why people talk of the burial as being that of a king and i think that's not unreasonable to be honest the helmet is is a development from the kind of of elaborate parade helmets that were worn by late reman emperors constantinian period for example and there was a purse with 37 coins and one black one ingot and three blanks i think and you would think that this purse would be really useful in giving us a nice precise date for the deposition of the burial of course as archaeologists you will know perfectly well it would only give you at best a tbq a terminus post quen that the earliest date at which it could have been buried but in fact it's that these coins are merevingian they're merevingian trimisses and this kind of coin currently particularly in the late sixth and seventh century early seventh century doesn't very often have the name of the king on it so they don't have things allow you to tie them into historical people at least not very often there is one coin here that has the name of a merevingian king feudiburt the second and his reign began in 595 ad he reigned i think 595 to 612 so that gives you what it gives you 595 as a starting point which is which is okay something the other coins will be well 600 the decades after 600 thereabouts there's some debate and discussion about how early this collection of coins could have been assembled one argument is that it could have been assembled as early as 613 others would put it later in the 630s it is an ongoing discussion and as far as dating precise dating is concerned everything points to 600 plus one or two decades it points to the 7th century somewhere in the 7th century the estimates have gone up and down actually the early to the mid or even the late 7th century but generally kind of settle around somewhere 626 30 something like that there is very little organic material one there was there were two radiocarbon dates one of them was on of a piece of wood which gave a very anomalous date I can't remember if it was extremely early or extremely late but it was decided that there was something wrong it had been contaminated by fungus or it didn't work but there was also beeswax out of a lamp and that had an initial radiocarbon date in the 1970s which came out too early it came out in the 6th century which didn't seem to make sense but of course later radiocarbon dates have become calibrated and Bayesian statistically analyzed and so forth so it comes out to being the first half of the 7th century or thereabouts so it doesn't give us any greater precision I mean it's a pity because you would think that beeswax would be pretty contemporary it wouldn't be ancient and so therefore it would be nice if it gave us a more exact date but everything homes in on that period in the early decades of the 7th century which of course allows everybody to pin it to a piece of history the venerable bead writing in the 8th century says that there was a king of East Anglia called Redwald and he refers to Redwald because he was briefly converted to Christianity on a visit to his Christian cousins in Kent but when he got home his wife said that was a bad idea she didn't think he should desert your pagan gods and so according to a very old man who told them will be that he'd seen it when he was young Redwald had a temple which had altars to other gods in it and he added an altar to the Christian god as well just to be on the safe side and I'll come back to Christianity because it's quite interesting this sort of mixture of ideas about how one might interpret it or represent it or understand whether anybody was in some sense or not a Christian so Redwald's dates are probably something like well he probably died something like 624 AD thereabouts and so he fits and so he's nearly always supposed to be the person buried in Mount One I have had phases who've been quite exasperated about this because I don't think archaeology should be totally within a sort of straight jacket or very limited historic dates and names and so forth but anyway he does seem to work pretty well so I suppose I don't think I can get away from saying that's possibly probably perhaps who he was okay and to continue the theme of being dressed up partly as a Roman emperor here are the shoulder clasps which are really they're really fantastically beautiful they're you know such exquisite workmanship you know these are gold and these little garnets you know to make these animals and so forth I think it was Rupert who connected it to this there's this imperial statue of Augustus but recently people who looked at it like Noah Adams for example have said that it wouldn't work fastening something metallic like that it might have been leather or no one even suggests it could perhaps have been something padded anyway these things those things fasten you know they're sort of fastening elaborate things on your shoulder that make you look grand and large while the helmet is making you look even grander and larger like a terrifying Germanic god and a Roman emperor which I think is part of the idea really there are other things which here are these hanging bowls which are fascinating because they carry a completely different kind of ornament from the one that you've just seen on the shoulder clasps it's this very sort of enamel spirally Celtic-y stuff and it does you know it does look as though it descends pretty directly from the kind of ornament that you find in Iron Age Europe pre-Roman non-classical Iron Age Europe and here we have one of these fantastic bowls with this very elaborate it's got ready enamel and it's also got new fury glass little slices set into the middle of it and there are things that have come from further afield these are possibly gifs coming all the way from Byzantium from the eastern Mediterranean there used to be an argument that said that these spoons showed that the person commemorated had been baptized because they say Sauros Saint Paulos some Latin or Greek scholar one in Latin letters and one in Greek but tends to be the feeling that one of them this one I assume is a proper Paulos and that the person doing this copied that and didn't really understand what they were doing so it isn't necessarily saying Sauros Paulos which would of course mean the conversion of Saul to Paul and yes there's a cross in the bottom of this bowl but you know somebody getting a gift with something Christian in it or you know Christian iconography on it isn't necessarily themselves Christian so it's it's an interesting gift from from the Byzantine Empire but doesn't necessarily say anything about the beliefs of the person who received them intriguingly this one might say a bit more this is the great gold buckle with really elaborate these are very complicated animal ornaments there's a sort of knot in the middle there let me try and do one of them there's an eye and there's the back of the head that goes into a beak and that is a neck which goes around look there's a back leg and there's the leg tied around the body and there's its back foot up there you need to see them drawn out they're very complicated this one's a bit easier look this is just one little beast there's his eye and there's his hooked beak and there's his front um front hip and a paw look there's paw and then there's the rest of his body he's sort of beetle almost and there's his hip and there's his claw like that okay so and when you first look at this you think wow that's a great clunking amount of gold which it certainly would be but actually it opens up it's hollow and that is interesting because there are whole classes of hollow hollow buckles and hollow of other things which have relics inside them you know valuable things that were holy or magical or important in some way or another um there are mariovingian buckles which have very christian symbolism on them so if anything suggested a tinge of christianity to this character it would actually be this this is a very um Germanic looking zoomorphic decorated buckle unexpectedly okay so the stuff in mound one has come from all over the place you know there are all these spots are all where the different the coins all came from different mints all over watch now france we've got the anesthesias dish and other things coming from constantinople and in fact the garnets which are ornamenting it would have originally come from even further they'd come way off this map some of them might have come from europe from bohemia but some of them came all the way from Sri Lanka or india because that seems to be where a lot of the garnets in in this kind of um stuff came from and one of the interesting things about the satan who garnet material is that it's so beautiful and so elaborate and skilled and uses such very large garnets at a time when on the continent they were getting rather a short supply of garnet so how come here we've got lots of nice big garnets getting through from india still still at a time when in france they've got hard you know the supplies are running out and they use a little minji little ones okay so on to the next phase of digging um which was in the 1980s um river bruce mitford had continued to think there should be more digging more mounds dug up and it wasn't in the 70s it really when i when i was digging south new actually it wasn't really a time when people thought that you ought to be digging kings or digging treasure or you should be um stripping open huge enormous sites and looking for ordinary people like your ordinary people at spongebob maybe and settlements but anyway they managed to get um the the some funding together from the society of antiquaries the british museum i think probably bbc as well and martin carver um was the person who was appointed to direct it and here you see him talking to charles thomas charles charles phillips in old age martin is a very energetic person here you see him nearly being drowned um in a replica ship up here it said our best wishes for your next trip by viking ship or something um they are now making a replica of the southern who ship but this was a replica of of the oseberg ship i think and clearly the 20th century people were not so skilled in sailing it as the vikings were anyway so martin did the assorted things at the beginning he um had the site cleared so here we are we have it all laid out that's like the picture i showed you at the beginning come back here and here is mound one the big one and he i don't know it's gone mad on me he wanted he he looked at mound two and at mound five and 17 i can't remember if he looked at any others but in any case the point of martin's approach was that he wasn't going to be just mound digging it was going to be a site i mean indeed as we were all thinking in the 70s what you should be doing is digging sites not just digging holes and things and he was also pretty clear that um you should only do the part of it and leave a part of it for the future and that the whole thing should be put in a much wider context you know the excavation the survey the immediate valley east anglia the north you know going out and out into all these ripples of circles and there you can see the sort of extent of his excavation and he did all sorts of survey in advance with standard machinery and experimental machinery and all sorts of kinds of things to try and find out as much as possible about the site before actually setting speed or a trail into the ground and there we have an overview of where the excavation in the 80s was and what this slide also shows is tranma house which was where eages pretty lived it was originally called southern who house i suppose and the last people to live in it before the national trust took it over were the tranmas in particular mrs anne tranma who was the person who was living there at the time that martin was doing this excavation yeah and so if you if you look at it you know that there is a sort of open area excavation and he's looking at this area and managed to find what they were expecting probably partly because of my spong hill was that would be very dense burials in here but there weren't there was nothing here but there were these characters out here and the ones around mound five now martin kind of sorted out an approximate potential sequence of burials and this you started out with this character here which is mound 17 yes so okay so so here is his sequence and there is still room for argument and for finessing it but broadly speaking and this is is the beginning which is actually the last most recent excavation on the site was in fact in 2000 ad underneath the visitor center where they found a cemetery sixth century which mostly predates southern the big mounds which are a short distance away so it's possibly the family or group of families who were burying in the tranma house cemetery who then got got above themselves or got more powerful and richer and started burying under the mounds and so this is starting out with cremations in bronze bowls and then there's the man and the horse the mound two which i'll come to and mound one finally he puts that at the end in fact and then i don't know what number six is i couldn't discover what his number six was and number seven are these strange burials which i'll come on to in a minute okay so here's the tranma house site underneath what is now the visitor center and there are inhumations and cremations and some in bronze bowls and so forth there and then here is mound 17 and this is one i mentioned earlier here is i think where the robber the robber hole was there but it missed everything because you know it was in between the two and there you have the young man and he's got a coffin and he's got various pots and things with him and he has a horse and in his grave he also had the bridle so there you go there are all the fittings very elaborate fittings for that horse see that kind of thing might well have existed in some of the other burials but alas we don't have them but anyway and it's and then mound two now mound two have been done by by basal and he'd been a bit mystified by it and found a few things and what the um carver team worked out was that there had been originally down here is a rectangular outline of a white sort of small chamber or a wide coffin and then um 1600 ish a hole had been done through the middle and all the treasure had been taken away and then in the 19th century somebody had come along and dug a trench through it and then basal came back in 38 and did another hole and didn't find anything very much so they finally took it all to pieces and worked out that there must have once been a ship there because of all these ship rivets um lots often so once upon a time um there had been a ship on top of a chamber grave and they also did sort of clever sciencey things which allowed them to work out where there had been things like a bucket and um iron things and you know to work out to some extent what had been in this this grave most of which had been completely disappeared and they did once had a ship on top of it okay then there's the mound one which we've heard about already and this explains more carefully um why the robber the robber hole missed it because the edge of the the edge of the original mound was probably something like that and at an earlier stage it had been whittled away and possibly like that in 1939 that was the edge of their mound there so you see this rubber pit here and it's just about missed the burial chamber which was there so that was that was fortunate now the other thing that Martin found was these which he's put there these Christian killing place which is that this is the bit where we will see traces that that there are no actual skeletons surviving on this site because organic material has gone completely and originally the idea was that in mound one there was perhaps a cenotaph no body but actually it's simply the fact that that bodies decay in that soil I mean anybody who's dug in that sandy soil knows that they simply don't survive and so when Martin sort of stripped open this area he began to find well his team began to find these dark marks which actually are the remnants of bodies and they're in two rather strange groups and so here you are and I think you can see this poor chap has had its head cut off and in a Roman cemetery you might not think that was too untoward but in what turned out to be something like the eighth or ninth century it is rather surprising and this is the most gruesome slide which I won't spend too long on so these shadow bodies these dark um this character has been all scratched up and all bound up let's leave it yes so so the remains of these bodies in two groups one group was was around one of the mounds mound five and one group was out in the middle of the field and it does seem most probable but what they are were executions executions at a time after the burial site to cease to be used for the burial of of royal family east anglian kings but it was possibly still a bit gruesome it was a strange place that you know in the olden days they used to bury people there and what this slide shows is that if you look on um an early map there's this little thing here if you look at that that's actually a representation of a gallows and it's actually says gallows hill anyway so they originally had the um the execution site down near the barrow that near the barrows near the southern who barrows and then at some stage twelfth century they moved it up there so you know it's a site that um possibly had some evil thoughts about it there you go there's the summary of that so the family cemetery underneath the visitor center um the burial mounds the possible eighth century executions the um twelfth century ones up there and yep okay on various things near here's the tranma house cemetery the one under the visitor center and there are probably there's probably a lot more to find there it's a bit frustrating i suspect there's a lot more that one could discover there maybe one day we will right so i've gone through the southern who material slightly slightly quickly but that's possibly a good thing it gives me time to talk about these other sites which have been discovered recently so here is the cover of the large book that's recently been published about the snappiture horde and the snappiture horde was discovered over here a long way away from all the area that we normally think of as being anglo-saxon england and it was a great heap of golden things discovered by a metal detectorist and it's still not at all clear how or why it got there but a wonderful amount of study has been devoted to the objects and because they're all broken and twisted and scoshed together it's been possible perhaps to do a more technical analysis than is necessarily permitted for the beautiful southern new objects which are on display in the budge museum so that all sorts of things have been discovered for example about the golden objects these are there's an enormous amount of gold there isn't any iron there isn't any copper it's nearly all gold and a little bit silver and what we've got there is about 70 sword pommels or fittings from about 70 swords there's a bit of a hilt thing there's a bit of a helmet and here is a scrambled up cross and there's a little thing from the handle of a of a knife a big knife for sacks here's something within the inscription I'll come under these again in a moment and here are these sword pyramids and I've just got that there because it's a nice picture and it has a whole sort of heap of them and makes it look a bit hoard like so several different scenarios it is this it almost certainly from defeated enemies the paraphernalia belonging to the kings possibly killed by the mercy and king pender who would fit possibly in the date or his or his son endless warfare between all these characters in the 7th century so is it a royal treasury a collection of stuff that they've got by warfare or by gift or tribute or what have you which has then been stolen by somebody who's going to bury it in the ground where it stayed for all these years that definitely would have been treasure trove if it had been found a few years because possibly well you would have endless arguments you can see why that lord didn't work arguing about whether you know anybody had intended to come back for it or not or has it been sacrificed to the gods or what there is still enormous debate you can read chapter 10 of this book to see what you think about it but certainly it's thrown a great deal of light on the technicalities the technical skill of the ageless sacks and craftsmen they could do things like changing the enriching the surface of the of the golden object so that you come out with a contrast did you see there's a contrast there so they've differentially treated different bits of that so that some of it comes out lighter or darker um explicitly sort of fitted together garnets which you which you could see on the sudden who things the analysis of the garnets here is what shows us that some of them have come from Sri Lanka some of them have come more nearby well not nearby from the from the Czech Republic from Bohemia and the interesting thing is it's it's it's all masculine war gear it's all bits of swords with the odd bit of helmet but also scrambled up christian crosses and this inscription so here is this inscription it's a folded up arm from across and it's a rather aggressive bit out of the bible something like arise oh lord and may your enemies be scattered and may those who hate you flee from your face um written twice in slightly different script this inscription incidentally like the coins from southern who has been the the point of debate about the date of the deposition of this material um different um paleo with us have had slightly different views about exactly where in the seventh century this inscription should be put but in the seventh century i think tending towards the middle of the seventh century and what the whole the horde as a whole conjures up is this fascinating combination of warfare and christianity so it was quite a muscular christianity these early anglo-saxon kings went in for and all these stories a bit like the constantine story that you know they they said okay if i win this battle um then i'll accept this god if his god wins the battle for me then okay he's worth worshiping if not not um and so here you have something like this this this is a reconstruction of the cross that you see folded up um not that one this one here so if you go along right here we are so a reconstruction drawing of that unfolded and you can see that it has these twisted animals the twisted zelomorphic animals particularly style two this is called of of which the anglo-saxons were very fond and a first sight you might think of this as being something that represents pagan ideology pagan ideas and beliefs and indeed it probably does or did but it seems to have been possible to incorporate it into um their new christian ideas and i just put on this object which is a metal detected find of a ring found in Essex and if you look you can see there's a rather strange almost headless person and oh goodness sorry about this and he's holding a processional cross which is a bit like the sapature horn big cross there are some smaller crosses from sapature as well but so this this mixture that ring is quite extraordinary it's got this very christian cross but it's got those looming birds that look very predatory and and sort of oath in like um and it's that kind of mixture which is is so fascinating about this seventh century art really and this kind of thing here so okay we've got the shoulder clasp again and look at this this these creatures going around here um and there's the sapature horde quite a lot of the material in the sapature horde is so light because of some material that it has been seriously suggested i think with good reason that it might very well have been made in the same workshop it'd be very nice if one day we managed to get something that actually clinches that but um okay but i put this on also because of this mixture of christian and non-christian because here we have the book of Darrow and a very early manuscript um and other of those intellectual arguments about whether it was made in Darrow in Ireland is it Irish or is it Anglo-Saxon or shall we compromise and say it was made in Iona just to keep everybody happy but anyway it's got these beasts which as you can see are sort of twisted and snakey and are quite reminiscent of these sorts of beasts and these ones and all the ones on the cross so a wonderful mixture of iconographies and reinterpretations of things okay so pursuing this theme of christianity um the tomb at Prittlewell the burial of Prittlewell which is near south end in Essex and this was found in 2003-4 i think and typically in one of those cold winters this was one of those things it was sort of mound on a roundabout which hadn't been destroyed for some reason and the road widening um archaeology ahead of the road widening and in fact the road widening never happened i think in the end um discovered this um you know almost well undisturbed it hadn't been robbed it hadn't been since it had been put there in 600 possibly a bit before 600 AD um there it was with all the things hanging on the wall this is a drawing of reconstruction but he honestly does look rather like that and you can see here with these little glass vessels and they're sort of sitting on the side there are i don't think i put in many of the slight pictures because after all this is a just a quick a quick intro to the site of Prittlewell it's got this little gold buckle which is very flimsy and has no signs of wear and would fall to pieces if you did try to wear it so that is one of the things that dates that it's that type of brooch i mean type of buckle which belongs to the which doesn't go very far into the seventh century at all um this is an imported thing let me have a look it's got okay so it's got imported things it's got local things it's got two more of these merivigin coins which are very annoying it's not being very precisely datable but look what it's got there it's got these two little tiny flimsy gold foil crosses which were probably laid on the eyes of the body uh it's another of these bodies that isn't there they had um the cap of a tooth i think there's a there's a bit of one bit of enamel from one tooth survive so these crosses are laid on the eyes of the person buried in that grave so either that person who's a Christian or whoever was burying them was and yet they're buried with all this palloply like some new stuff and i think you know this is this isn't the only instance of elaborate burials with lots of stuff there are plenty on the continent where actually there's sometimes even in a church um some of the early founding Christian burials we shouldn't sort of have this hard and fast line that putting things in a grave means you're a pagan and not having them in means you're a Christian it doesn't work like that at all and certainly at this stage in the seventh century in the early days of conversion and when things were being sort of sorted out and reinterpreted and reimagined i i think it's not all surprising that we find these sorts of things the dating of this at the moment depends on some radiocarbon dates it depends on um typology it's being argued that it's by by the main by the lead author chris skull it's argued that this is probably in the 680s or 90s and therefore it predates since augustin's the visit to kent to convert the england saxons in 697 which doesn't worry me at the least i mean in fact there were clearly christians in kent before augustin arrived that's why he came because uh et albert had married bertha who was a frankish christian princess there would be bound to have been christians um the one at one of the the esics king of the day was married to the sister of et albert who was quite possibly could have been a christian herself so i don't see why there would not have been christians in england before said augustin it's another of these things like you know since you've got redwald it has to be redwald which i suppose perhaps it might be um if you've got christianity it has to be after 697 well no it doesn't it doesn't necessarily at all it's demonstrates it doesn't it's beautiful glass things these glass things they're they're they're um not very many of these uh crisscross trellis work on them and then rendelsham which i must finish up with um rendelsham is pretty close to southern who it's a little bit further up the river demon so there's southern who and here is rendelsham and here again bead gives us chapter and verse that rendelsham is where um redwald actually had a villager he actually lived there and maybe he did live there he wanted to do another and in recent years so a lot of people have looked for rendelsham but eventually it was a metal detectorist who found it and originally some fly-by-night type of metal detectorists came illegally and took away stuff but then it was very systematically searched by these this excellent team here who um walked up and down these fields over and over again um in collaboration with the suffoc archaeological service and produced masses and masses of stuff there's been limited excavation and um probably will be some more there are some excellent online lectures about the site and it's it's producing all sorts of extraordinary things that there is metalworking going on there are Byzantine coins there are things coming in there are local things being made and it occupies this huge huge area i haven't got to that bit yet so what rendelsham tells us is that you know southern who could it could have been where the southern who people lived or alternatively it could have been an alternative residence it definitely shows that material like the material buried in southern human one was being made at very close by in in rendelsham and that this was a site that was continued in occupation and significance through from the late roman into perhaps the um well the late 7th century 8th century probably so it's a local a locally significant place which is in operation in the late roman period and through into the early medieval and it's probably eventually eclipsed when ip switch starts up um in the 700s which i'm not going to talk about today right so all these new and interesting finds coming up in quite recent years which all combine to give us an image of a fairly dynamic period in the 7th century particularly and restand here is a place that was in contact with the rest of the world that was had craftsmen that could produce amazingly complicated and interesting stuff and that was able to muster large numbers of people to do all sorts of stuff and was had an independent take on things like christianity coming in from outside um i didn't say that that one of martin carver's um contensions is that he's that sudden who is aggressively pagan and that this is a symbol of the east anglian standing out against the frankish christians that both kent and north umbrae were going in for i don't follow that line i i think i wouldn't i i wouldn't stick by it being such a clear cut distinction between the pagan and christian myself i i think rebel certainly did probably dabble with um christianity okay so let's return to the film the dig and you can see that they focused only on one part of the story and i said at the beginning i i think they they had the atmospheric um suffered landscape beautifully down even although their actual reconstruction of the boat was in sorry i think but i think the central characters were brilliant edith and basal and edith didn't die at the end of the dig she she had a few years she died in 1942 she she had well it says in a little biography author that she she had a blood clot or something but she was pretty active up to the end she was sitting as a magistrate in woodbridge the day she died i think but she she was in ill health but but not quite so faded away her son robert um was then went to live with her sister elizabeth his aunt and was brought up by her basal lived on to i don't know wait did late 80s nearly 90 and went on digging i i met him once he he came to west stowe and um because he worked with stanley west who was running the dig at west stowe he was he was very much into spiritualism which which stanley i think thought was a bit odd he'd dug himself he had stanley had dug a small trench looking for some roman kilns at west stowe so in fact the the sort of the imminent world war two problem um they were all it was very imminent it was about to happen but most of these people survived actually um i don't think any of them was killed in the war though they had various war work various services in different places so down here on the bottom these three three musketeers i think he looks like the baddie and the red is a lot stark but that's a bit unfair um he's he's actually kendrick who eventually became sir thomas kendrick director of the british museum and that's somebody else from the bm called plender lease who was into the conservation but this is guy maynard and i i feel a bit sorry for guy maynard from ipswitch museum because he obviously would have loved to have had all the treasure in in ipswitch museum and he didn't have it and he had several he had several run-ins with charles phillips who is there i mean the two of them really never never got on and didn't couldn't speak to each other i don't think um these characters here well there's a yeah basal yes i'll come on to basal ground in a minute um here is um peggy pigard as she then was and peggy um was married to stewart for about 20 years the novel on which this is based which was actually written by um her nephew john preston speculated that um that stewart was gay i have no idea who knows anyway they were married for 20 years the marriage broke down in the 50s so not in 1939 and peggy then married um an italian i don't think that marriage lasted very long either and when i met her in the 1970s she was there after usually known as peggy peter she was traveling around with a friend in a in a camper van looking at anglo-saxon beads because she read an excellent book on anglo-saxon beads she was very jolly and she and stewart were jointly president of the wiltshire archaeological society you know for in their older age they lived close to each other and knew each other i don't think they moved back in together but you know they were they were friends in their older age stewart of course became he had been working on windmill hill and avery he became professor in edinburgh um this one with his back to us so that's stewart that's peggy that's chance phillips um that's um grimes who um got quite famous for excavating the miss rayam in london when london had been bombed he became director of the institute of archaeology in london i remember hearing him lecture and that's the bottom half of graham clark who um didn't actually excavate but came out from camish to visit and was of course for many years professor of archaeology at um at cambridge so before i get onto this just to say something about basal brown and incidentally that photograph there is taken by basal so basal and his relationship to all these other archaeologists who came in though obviously was some tension i and you know he it was a part of your class issue he was to some extent a laborer he was you know he was he was paid by mrs pritchie and that of course was what he and she insisted on right lean said he couldn't be sacked by phillips or by some it's which museum he i think he and charles phillips did get actually a decent relationship going and stayed in touch for the rest of their lives in fact um and later on um rupert bruce midford had a lot of contact with with basal um he came to visit the the treasure in the in the museum on more than one occasion and um was in was in touch with rupert he died in 77 so he didn't get to see martin's excavations whereas charles phillips lived into the 80s so he did he'd come and visit and so did rupert in fact so um there was a decent relationship i think between between those people actually working on on on the site but it's true that basal was a bit eclipsed in terms of news about it so i mean when i first heard about something who it was all about the treasure and about the stuff in the british museum and rupert bruce midford and um this other set of people here and okay yes basal had dug the boat wasn't that a good thing but not much about him and there's an account by someone who who knew basal who said she went to look at a big exhibition they had and it never mentioned basal and i think that's true i think the british museum exhibition of satan who until very recently didn't say very much about basal and that was really i think because it was so much about the treasure it was it was all about you know the treasure the beautiful things that we've got on display in the museum and it wasn't so much about the ship and about the technical cleverness that we can understand how all these things were made and where they all came from and so i think he did get sidelined a bit but as i said he certainly wasn't forgotten by all the other excavators of the site um and he i think it is good that he's got his due now in in this film like that um that gives one the the impression of of how significant it was because if he hadn't excavated that boat so successfully as he did the thing wouldn't have been so um become so so famous and indeed it wouldn't have been such a good excavation um so yeah i think it's i think it's good that he has now got his due and has been acted so beautifully by rare finds so i think at that point i'll stop and i should of course give thanks to all the people who whose works i have read and you can find out more about i went through everything quite quickly i know and you can find out more about everything there is a great wealth of printed and online resources of one kind or another and i suppose i say thanks to martin because i had used quite a lot of his pictures actually and also had some arguments with him about stuff and so i do admire him as a field archaeologist i think his unraveling of of mount twos produced on right well i'm gonna unmute myself and thank you very much and uh this is the way we do it now in the land and land of zoom um thank you so much kathryn that was just fantastic and so rich of material um i really appreciate it so uh there are a few um attendees today and so i'd like to open up if there's any questions uh we we probably don't want to take too much time but maybe just a couple questions kathryn if you'd be willing to yeah certainly i hope i have gone on too long i'm afraid i didn't keep you too track of the time absolutely brilliant and you covered so much i'm sure you answered a lot of questions that you know people who've seen the movie and don't know much about just many things about it not only how the movie was made in a way what they accentuated but also the site in its whole kind of place in its time and world really rich wonderful so i'm gonna leave the open eye would you unmute yourselves if you have a question please and um either say you have a question in chat and then i'll call on you or just shout out your question this is tim i have a question yeah great the faceless one here sorry i'll figure out the camera later yeah just on this i i'm i'm just curious to hear maybe a few more comments on the interplay between a partly fictional and partly truthful representation in the movie on the one hand and you know what actually happened and uh you know obviously it was a i don't know if it was made in hollywood but it was kind of a hollywood inspired by a true story kind of thing and in those situations they tend to change characters around and i get it it was based on a novel that itself wasn't entirely accurate historically uh but but i'm curious in terms of the effect i mean a lot of us have have seen it and other people have talked have seen it and really liked the movie so i'm just curious what you think the effect of a movie like that will have positive and negative on on this excavation and and uh english archaeology well i suppose i was trying to answer some aspects of that question i mean i i enjoyed the film i i liked it and i thought some of it was very good quite a lot of it was quite carefully researched i mean that kind of film always goes into you know what kind of car or what kind of telephone or what kind of machine which you've had her heart tested on or you know i mean all that kind of surrounding detail and i think they went to quite a lot of trouble doing their their reconstructed dig you know they they dug this hole in some field i think sorry somewhere so it wasn't digging through sand so i think that the the main thing that wasn't true was um the fictional relationship between Peggy Peggy Guido and the invented photographer and i think i think i did jar of it um i can see it was better in the film than it was in the book i i liked the film better than i like the book in the book i did have this i felt a bit queasy because these were people i knew actually although i didn't know them well they were all pretty ancient when i was a student and i went to the lectures and things like that but i i don't know i i didn't like that but in the film even the love affair was slightly better because it was feeding into that theme about the imminence of world war two and the transience of life and all that kind of stuff so i think there were i think there were things that that particularly Basil Brown said and did there were things that i didn't mind i didn't mind the fictional bit of Robert on his bicycle bicycle thing to tell Basil to come back which i mean you know that didn't happen but um i didn't i didn't mind that i mean i think he probably did have to sort of you know take a deep breath and think right i'm going on on his diary has things about how he tries to keep out of the disputes and arguments and so forth so so i thought it was a lot better than a lot of films i've seen that purport to be about real things which usually annoy me a lot and this one after all i know quite a lot about the effect on British archaeology um well every so often we have something that enlivens us and brings us into the public domain and i think this isn't a bad thing um i suppose it focused a bit on the on the class issue that was another strand that came in you know the bit between Basil and all the characters coming down from London and indeed Edith Pritchie i mean you know she Edith Pritchie lived all by herself as a poor widow with with one child but she had about i don't know about eight staff in that house i think you know there were there were she had two gardeners she had a cook she had maids and a butler you know like the butler who was being so you know unfriendly when Basil first knocked on the door for things like that um i think it's on the whole positive i mean we did we only saw a bit of the digging um it wasn't so the most i mean these days if you did a dig like that if you didn't have a world war looming down you or covid or something well um you would lift a lot of those things in blocks i suppose and of course when yeah so i'm with the later excavations happened there was there were slower and they were very they were more meticulous and except you know having said that Basil was pretty meticulous on that boat so yeah i mean i do i do find those those real those things based on a real story i do find a bit queasy making and i was actually surprised that i enjoyed this one a lot more than i expected to i don't know if that answers your question it's a tricky interesting question yeah it does thank you very much um i have a question actually about visiting these different places um so the British Museum and the actual site of Sutton Hill i haven't been there and i know you know post covid hopefully people will have been intrigued by this film and will want to know more and so can you comment on what um what there is to actually see at Sutton Hill and how that experience is different than what you see at the museum something who um something who now belongs to the national trust and um i know they've been revamping their visitor center so the house that belonged to mrs pretty the last time i was there a year or two ago before covid um they had a very good exhibition about 1939 excavation in what had been mrs pretty's drawing room and they had various films and news news reports so there were a couple of television films made um in the 60s and 70s which had people reminiscing and talking about it so that was excellent and i do hope that exhibition is still there it was about the best thing i think they've done the visitor center they were just revamping that that doesn't have most of the original finds in it which in some ways i should have thought is quite a good thing because it doesn't have to have such dreadful security and insurance and so forth um it's had a couple of incarnations of different versions of the center of reconstructions of the central burial chamber in it neither of which worked and i don't know what the present one is like i i don't know videos of things but and lots of they had some actual finds from the 1980s excavation and from the trauma house actually had had some stuff from the trauma house so they usually have some actual finds and also some replicas and the replicas are usually very interesting because there are a lot of enthusiasts down there who do things like there was a a retired mason who made a beautiful replica of the whetstone and you know all the time he was doing it brian anseld his name and he was sitting there doing it and he said you know he learned so much about the original one he was doing it all the careful measurements and all that sort of stuff and um and so people could watch him doing it and that's always very interesting and so it's a very authentic you know it's a very beautifully shaped and an accurate replica replica of the swords and there were usually reenactors around there dressed up as red world well on a on a high day and holiday not not every day obviously so there's the visitor center that you actually go into and you can see displays and information and replicas and stuff and so forth the house as i said the last time i was there it was open and then you walk out to the mounds and they were redoing how you approached them they i think they've changed they're constructed a rather wonky looking tower that you were supposed to be able to go up i wasn't sure how that was going to work i may be proved wrong when i saw them building it i thought that looks a bit wobbly and you can only get six people in it it's going to take forever and ever for everybody to get up there actually so um i don't know i don't know but you you know so you walk you go it's a nice it's a very nice visit i do in fact recommend it you can and it combines you know it's got the usual national trust nice tea shop and um and shop and laboratories and so forth all very convenient the whatever's going on in the actual house which i hope is still that mrs pretty 1939 exhibition the visitor center which you know you go it's it's a big room kind of thing when you go in and you see a lot of stuff and then walking around the mounds and no definitely i the british museum experience is different and it's you know it's you've probably been to the british museum you know it's one gallery and again the last time they read it that i thought they'd focused even more than usual on treasure or on glitter so the great gold buckle you could hardly see it was just going bling bling bling at you which was possibly deliberate the way they'd lit it you couldn't see the detail you couldn't see the animal ornament on it at all and not much of the kind of thing i've been talking about is in that display as i recall it i mean it's it's you know beautifully displayed artifacts and talking about them but not so much about the background of the site i don't think so you should do both of course but if i was going to choose i think i'd go to the i go to the actual site i go to some human stuff but they're not open at the moment if you i think you can go and walk around i think i think at the moment some who if you're a local it can be the place that you go for a walk but i don't think you're supposed to drive there from anywhere else at the moment and certainly the the visitor center wouldn't be open but hopefully hopefully cross fingers soon i have a question um you probably know Catherine and thank you so much that was really an amazing talk and really good so much more to think about and i think for people who've only seen the movie i mean it's a wonderful way to convey to them the difficulties the anxieties the contacts and all the kinds of things you have to think about that makes archaeology so much more than the treasure um which is of course what we all all want but if you are properly aware there has been a a blog post that's gone around about some of the issues regarding the representation of the women in the movie um and i guess the one question in terms of where you might move a little bit away from interpretation i mean was this is pretty depended uh represented as some sort of weakling um and that's that's an interpretation but what about the fact the photographer is what um people have focused on yes that's right so i mean mrs pretty as i said that you know in the first well the first 40 years of her life had been pretty i mean perhaps a devoted daughter but also a very energetic and well traveled woman and a philanthropist and a magistrate and god knows what all she was you know she was not in good health by the time the excavation happened um she was obviously older than than carry maligan presents her as being um but she she was a woman with her own ideas her own mind so i mean i i didn't mind too much the way she was represented and it exaggerated her illness and you know made her but the other women yes i mean i think i did say that that peggy pigot was misrepresented i mean that's perfectly true she was shown as being a bit of a very beautiful of course lily jeff but she comes in and you know treads on things whereas in fact she'd been digging for a couple of years and i think i think rachel poke who's one of the most energetic um critics of this is writing a book about who i hope she does an interesting woman so she'd she'd been um she was an experienced archaeologist she knew what she was doing and also she certainly hadn't come fresh on her honeymoon and um she remained married to stewart for years and years afterwards and i think the thing i disliked most about the book which also turns up a little bit in the film was this bit about you know stewart being gay and they you know the long consummation of the marriage so i have to say somebody did say that the end of their marriage it was on grounds of non-consumption but i just thought that was very prurient somehow and i didn't like it at all and it didn't represent peggy as being you know a dynamic energetic woman which you know she was young in those days but she was certainly a pretty forceful jolly sort of female at the time i knew a little bit about her and met her so yes it does misrepresent her and i think that was following the novel story and i really i i disliked that as i said that i thought they invented photographer worked better in the film than in the novel where i disliked him quite a lot and yeah there's those women they there's mercy lack and Barbara Wagstaff they were pioneering in in terms of the photography they achieved it is true they didn't take the site photos they they took the empty ship um many pictures of the empty ship very i mean that's our best evidence for that for that ship is their photographs um the site photographs were mostly taken by members of the of the team you know philips or crawford crawford took a lot of emoji as crawford who founded antiquity and um did all sorts of other things so i i mean i i read some of that stuff and i and i agree it it wasn't it's certainly unfair to peggy and um it it sort of you know reminded me of how much i disliked that particular video i didn't like the book at all to be very honest i i wasn't looking i wasn't looking forward to the film and then i was rather seduced by it i you know it was i thought it was i thought it did a lot of good things the film whereas i wasn't so sure about that book yeah well and i think you know denying or erasing the existence of the two women as the photographers was you know really yeah although they did come in late but they they were in the later phase but yes it was yes it was about things yeah less than that right i think i think you're right about um the representation of piggy picket is the ultimate why he did that i don't know and in the book it's not weird that she was in the book he does the same thing and he's writing about her as some kind of anjanu yes and that's what really came through and she they were married long before Sutton who so we're married 26 years yeah i mean that's three years before whereas now it looks as though she they were having their honeymoon in the book and she was just discovering i know i know it's ridiculous it's crazy and she was actually just as experienced in the field as as stewart was i mean i don't you know i was really interested i didn't realize until the i saw the credits that the stewart they were talking about was my old professor stewart pigot right oh yes and then i kind of it's i mean i know that you you were kind of offended by the way he was portrayed but he was a little like that there was definitely you know the distancing from any um from intimacy was definitely part of his his character but um so i i actually thought that that was caught although it was very exaggerated in the film you know it was became part of part of the theme but but the way she was treated was i thought not not good and it started with her nephew he was the one who did the portraying you think that he would have had more respect for his aunt yes it's very it's very odd i mean he's he's an author who is written you know highly acclaimed biographies including one of max ball so you know he's a an experienced man knows what he's doing but not in that novel i really don't know why he did that at all i wouldn't want my nephew to write about me that way it's just the way you know it's nothing you can do about it either and i mean in the film the chap was going off obviously to be killed in the battle of britain one could see that so so it's they sort of got it into a theme a meaningful theme but i i agree it was it was not needed at all and it also meant we had one brief horrible glimpse of some some humping going on and out among the trees which the film was otherwise most simply free of what i think that was when when i i actually saw a preview and they had a christian answer session with the um actors and they they were talking to each other not to us i mean you know but it was interesting to see what they had to say and they were nice and they'd sort of taken it seriously i know ralph um the what not certainly had taken it very seriously and found out about archaeology and has a has a step brother who is an archaeologist i think something like that but um anyway they had actually you know they had this discussion about it was good that there wasn't a lot of sex in it but they'd resisted the temptation to make the ghastly idea that basal and edith might have had an affair you know which was which was you know which even a trendy film director didn't manage to stoop to that level so yeah no it was lovely to have a film that didn't have any sex in it at least hardly any except shoehorned in with with the with the fake photographer well i think um i think that we have uh asked many questions of you and you've answered many questions in your talk so um i really think that we'll um call it a day now and really thank you again for kathryn for this knowledgeable and deep deep read deeply read uh talk about just my subject i know you're the one to do it exactly um we're i'm thrilled that you agree to do this and very appreciative um and i know that many many people will be um enjoying this lecture of yours so i'd really like to thank you very much and i don't know how really to do it with any kind of um happy laws other than everybody should have themselves because if they don't it's only me applauding so maybe you could all do that so we could all thank you thank you very much you're a you're a lovely audience and considering it's breakfast time i think that's pretty impressive and no thank you very much for inviting me christine because it it did as i say it prodded me to go back and and revisit all this stuff and but which also i i'd been thinking of since since i watched the film and i started having thoughts but uh yeah i mean that's it's interesting so i i don't know what you've actually had on archaeology you know it's one of those things that brings it to the fore and makes people think about it for a while and then it fades away again i suppose but anyway not really not in england something who's going to remain always very popular so well i'm sure the national trust is looking forward to opening and hoping that the the film bounce will will carry over into may or june or whenever it is well allowed to emerge into the world again i'm sure it will i'm sure i hope all of you you look well i hope you all are ticking over in this hanging in there with our backs in on in there in this weird thing yeah yeah so thank you i'm going to um stop this morning i guess and look all of this all of these things that i said to you about further