Beyond The Dig: is there more buried treasure in Suffolk?

Where is England’s ‘valley of the kings’? You’d be forgiven for not knowing. The Anglo-Saxon monarchs buried there are, like much of the rest of that period, little more than a footnote in the crash course in history you get at school.

When the Romans headed home in the fourth century, it’s often thought that not much happened in Britain for a few hundred years. If those who took the road back to Rome were cultured and civilised, the people they left behind were, well, anything but. But a new film by Netflix on the Anglo-Saxon treasure unearthed at Sutton Hoo puts paid to the idea that the Romans’ successors were just a bunch of brutes.

As war broke out across Europe in 1939, archaeologists back home in Britain began to dig. Their quarry was a series of mounds in the Suffolk countryside. These hills had baffled people for centuries: what were these strange tumuli that rose above the flat-as-a-pancake East Anglia countryside? It was clear that the piles of earth were manmade, but while grave robbers during the middle ages had stolen much of the treasure, some of the sites had been left virtually untouched.