Public Archaeology for the Dark Ages

Destroy the ‘Sutton Hoo Treasure’!

“…Lucy 1998Lucy , 2000Williams 2006aWilliams & b, 2007a see also now Harland 2021: 41-92), there have been far fewer evaluations of the subdiscipline's 20th-and 21stcentury development and the politics and popular intersections of its interpretive frameworks, methods and techniques (but see Lucy 1998Lucy , 2000Lucy , 2002Content and Williams 2010;Dickinson 2011). There have been fewer still discussions regarding Anglo-Saxon archaeology's recent endeavours in public archaeology and heritage interpretation (Marzinzik 2011;McCombe 2011;Walsh and Williams 2019;Williams 2020aWilliams , 2020b. Filmer-Sankey (2007) offered a rare and specific intervention by exploring the shifting perception of Sutton Hoo's Mound 1 on the European stage.…”

“…Whilst pursuing this review, I have adopted a more neutral term for the contents of the burial chamber within the ship beneath Mound 1: namely the 'Mound 1 assemblage' (following Hinton 2005: 60) or else the 'burial assemblage', 'grave-goods' or 'finds'. By pursuing the troubling and tenacious entanglement of 'treasure(s)' in British early medieval burial archaeology, the academic, heritage and popular interpretations of the Mound 1 ship-burial constitutes a case study of the politics and popular culture of early medieval burial archaeology relating to both the contentious status of museum displays and broader Anglo-Saxonist ideological discourses on nationhood and race (Williams 2020a). Simultaneously, the case study reveals the widespread commodification and valorisation of early medieval grave-goods as 'art' to be extracted, acquired, traded, collected and displayed and thus downplaying their funerary context (Cross 2019;Daubney 2019).…”