WHERE DID YOU GET THAT HAT?

Found in 1979 in the largest Early Anglo-Saxon cemetery ever to be excavated, located at Spong Hill in Norfolk, UK, a unique pottery funerary urn lid is one of the few representations of a three-dimensional human figure from the entire period. As a find, it raises many interesting questions.

Murray Dahm

The Spong Hill cemetery, located near North Elmham, Norfolk, is one of the largest pagan cemeteries from early Anglo-Saxon Britain to be excavated. Ploughing had revealed fragments of cremation urns since the eighteenth century, with subsequent sporadic excavations revealing exciting finds, but threats from continued ploughing meant the entire site was excavated between 1972 and 1984. The Spong Hill Man was found in a rabbit burrow in 1979. The cemetery, which was likely the main cemetery for the surrounding area, was used from ca. AD 400–420, just before the first Germanic ‘invasion’, to AD 600. It contains around 2500 hundred burials in total, including more than 2000 cremations. There are a small number of inhumation burials – late-Roman Christians’ preferred burial practice – in the cemetery, which date to the…

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Ancient Warfare (Digital) - 1 Issue, AW XVIII.1

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