Transcript
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It's time to refresh your yard during Spring Backyard Days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179 like the next grill 3 burner gas grill. Or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit Grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay String lights that bring it all together. Shop Spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot, now through May 6. Exclusions applies to homedevot.com Pricematch for details.
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It is May 11, 1939, just before midday on a country estate in Suffolk, eastern England. Three men are at work excavating. They have dug a trench just over a meter wide that cuts across a small grassy hillock, the biggest of almost 20 mounds of various sizes on the sandy heathland that rolls down to the River Deben. The estate is known as Sutton Hoo. In Old English, Sutton means a southern farmstead or settlement, and a hoo is a high spur of land. A stone's throw away stands a large, pale Edwardian house. From time to time, its owner, Edith Pretty, glances through the bay windows to try and catch a glimpse of her employees progress. In charge of the group is Basil Brown, a self taught archaeologist. He is a slight man wearing a battered trilby and smoking a bubbling pipe. He is helped by a gardener, John Jacobs, and William Spooner, a gamekeeper. It's warm work in the May sunshine. Brown's mind has started to drift to thoughts of lunch, but then a sharp shout interrupts his daydreaming. The gardener is calling out that he has found a bit of iron. Brown rushes over to Jacobs in time to stop him from removing his find from its position in the sandy soil. It's a rusty rivet, a large mushroom shaped nail for holding together pieces of wood. Brown calls a pause to proceedings carefully with bare hands and a small trowel, he begins to explore the area nearby and discovers five more rivets in a neat row. They are too evenly spaced for coincidence, so they must have been part of something else, holding some long perished material together. He takes a step back and an image comes to him, the shape of the wooden hull of a vanished ship. Keeping his excitement to himself for a moment, he decides to change his technique, widening the trench to encompass the emerging hollow of the vessel. As he works, Brown becomes familiar with the telltale sign of a rivet, a pink patch in the yellow sand. Each time he dusts the sandy soil away delicately with a pastry brush, revealing a reddish piece of corroded iron. New rivets appear at such regular intervals, around 15cm between each, that Brown can predict their appearance and leaves a protective coat of sand over them. Soon his hunch about the outline of a ship is confirmed. The curve of the wooden craft is delicately imprinted in the sand. You can see where the planks, the ribs and even some of the tholes or pins for the oars would have been. But nothing remains of the timber vessel itself. It is a fossil, a ghost. Pausing from his work for a moment to relight his pipe, Brown has a hunch that the discovery of this ghost ship will be the find of his life. If there is a burial chamber intact within it, perhaps there will be even better to come. But nothing in this moment could prepare him for the bounty that would be uncovered at Sutton Hoo that summer. The discovery at Sutton Hoo of the ship burial of an Anglo Saxon king and his lavish treasure is one of the greatest archaeological finds on English soil. It has been compared with the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and called page one of British history. The treasure, including the famous Sutton Hoo helmet, now resides at the British Museum and has shone a light on the era once known as the Dark Ages. But who was the man considered worthy of such a splendid burial? Why was there no trace of human remains? What lies beneath the other mounds on the site? And why bury a body in a ship? I'm John Hopkins and this is a short history of the ship burial of Sutton Hoo. It is 410 A.D. and Britain is at a crossroads. After three and a half centuries under Roman rule, the city of Rome is under attack and its soldiers return home to defend it, leaving the empire at the point of collapse. Roman Emperor Honorius writes a farewell letter to the people of Britain. Fight bravely and defend your lives, he tells them. You are on your own now. Without Roman protection, the island is now vulnerable to invaders. Traveling across the North Sea from northwestern Europe and entering via the estuaries of the east coast, their small, fast boats make their way up through the rivers of the Fens, the low lying marshy regions of eastern England. The first to arrive are mercenary Germanic troops paid by local rulers, attempting to maintain an element of rapid Roman authority. But later arrivals aren't just here to conquer. They want to settle. Whole families come and build villages of wooden houses and thatched roofs. They grow crops and keep animals. They also work metal into beautifully wrought jewelry and weapons. The Anglo Saxons, as we now call them, aren't a single people, but a loose grouping of tribes who arrive from southern Scandinavia, northern Germany and the Netherlands. Gareth Williams is a curator at the British Museum and author of Treasures From Sutton Hoo.
