Excavations
In 1937, Mrs Edith May Pretty employed Basil Brown, a Suffolk archaeologist who had excavated for Ipswich Museum since 1934 to explore the ancient mounds near her house at Sutton Hoo. Brown opened three mounds in 1938. He realised that they had been rich Anglo-Saxon graves, and found traces of a buried boat. All of them had already been plundered.
In 1939 Basil Brown opened the largest mound (Mound 1). Cutting a trench from east to west, he discovered iron ship-rivets in the sand. Without removing them he worked carefully and gradually revealed the shape of a 27m (90ft) ship; the wood had rotted leaving only a stain in the sandy soil. Charles Phillips, a Cambridge University archaeologist was brought in to excavate the burial chamber, while Brown kept on uncovering the ship.
Treasures, weapons, symbolic objects, Anglo-Saxon gold ornaments, Byzantine silver other objects from France and artefacts of Swedish-influenced design were laid out in the ship.
This was the summer of 1939 and the Second World War loomed. The ship's remains were covered with bracken and soil. During the war Bren-gun carriers were driven on the site. The treasure meanwhile was safely stored in the London Underground while the city was bombed above.
Between 1965 and 1971 the British Museum reinvestigated the cemetery, particularly the mound dug by Basil Brown in 1939 (Mound 1) and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new research project was entrusted to Martin Carver of the University of York. Further mounds were excavated and modern techniques were used to appraise the contents of other mounds on the Sutton Hoo site.
The National Trust at Sutton Hoo works in partnership with the British Museum on a changing programme of annual displays of material from the Ship Burial. For information on this material in the collection of the British Museum see COMPASS, the online database of the British Musem's collection. For information on the British Museum's national partnership scheme see www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/partnershipuk/index.html.
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