The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in North-Western Europe

The age of Sutton Hoo runs from the fifth to the eighth century AD -a dark and difficult age, where hard evidence is rare, but glittering and richly varied. Myths, king-lists, place-names, sagas, palaces, belt-buckles, middens andgraves are all grist to the archaeologist's mill. This book celebrates the anniversary of the discovery of that most famous burial at Sutton Hoo. Fifty years ago this great treasure, now in the British Museum, was unearthed fromthe centre of a ninety-foot-long ship buried on remote Suffolk heathland. Included in this volume is the director Martin Carver's summary of the latest excavations, which represent the current state of knowledge about this extraordinary site. That it still has secrets to reveal is shown by the last-minute discovery of a striking burial of a young noble with his horse and grave goods. M.O.H. CARVER is Professor of Archaeology at York University, and Director of the Sutton Hoo Research Project.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 East Anglia: before Sutton Hoo - structures of power and society, C.J. Scull; late Roman and Anglo-Saxon settlement pattern, J. Newman; Snape Anglo-Saxon cemetery, W. Filmer-Sankey; a chronology for Suffolk place-names, M. Gelling; Beowulf and the East Anglian royal pedigree, S. Newton; kings, gesiths and thegns, H. Loyn. Part 2 England: burial practice, H. Geake; 7th-century cremation burial in Asthall Barrow, Oxfordshire, T.M. Dickinson and G. Speake; Anglo-Saxon symbolism, J.D. Richards; Anglo-Saxon weapon burial rite, H. Harke; royal power and royal symbols in "Beowulf", B. Raw; Christianity in Southumbria,, Jane Stevenson; Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, J. Roberts. Part 3 North-Western Europe: western and northern Britain, L. Alcock; Pictland, S.M. Foster; Frankish hegemony in England, I.N. Wood; royal burial among the Franks, E. James; the undiscovered grave of King Clovis, P. Perin; social change around AD600, G. Hassall; the Royal Cemetery at Borre, Vestfold (Norway), B. Myhre; the Scandinavian character of Anglian England, J. Hines; human sacrifice in the late pagan period, H. Ellis Davidson. Postscript: the Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Sutton Hoo, M.O.H. Carver.

About the Author :
Martin Carver has been publishing with Boydell since 1993, and is one of the leading archaeologists in Britain, and indeed Europe. He was professor at York from 1986 to 2008. He has been responsible for most of the excavations at Sutton Hoo since the 1970s.

Review :
A valuable interim report on the 1983-92 excavation... most exciting may be the parallels suggested from Merovingian and Scandinavian Europe. A major contribution to the Sutton Hoo literature. CHOICEA major reassessment of the political and economic context of this burial ground - a very important book. MEDIEVAL ARCHAEOLOGYAs soon as this news gets out [Martin Carver's 'interim report' on the cemetery], no one will ever again be able to equate Sutton Hoo simply with Mound 1, or for that matter with any conventional assumptions about the Anglo-Saxons of any period from the fifth to the eleventh century... some of the most stunning information.