Snape boat grave

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The Snape boat grave is a 6th century boat grave found at Snape Common, near Aldeburgh in Suffolk, East Anglia.

This was the first boat grave of its kind discovered in England (since the ship found at Ashby Dell near Lowestoft, Suffolk in 1834 in a silted river channel may not have contained a grave), and foreshadowed the discovery of the two large ship-burials, one of them plundered, at Sutton Hoo, Mounds 1 and 2. It appears certain that Sutton Hoo Mound 2 was opened at about the same time as the Snape excavation, because there is a report of that date of a large quantity of iron ship-rivets having been excavated there and afterwards rendered into horseshoes.

A group of barrows was excavated here in 1862 under the direction of Septimus Davidson and Nicholas Fenwick Hele of Aldeburgh, and the remains of a clinker-built boat about 15 m long was found in the soil under the largest of the barrows. The ship had been used to contain a high status burial, and had been lowered into land which had previously contained cremated burials in urns, some of which had been carefully removed and reburied when the ship was mound-laid. The grave goods from the ship included fragments of an amber glass claw beaker of early Anglo-Saxon manufacture and a gold ring with filigree of possibly German manufacture containing an antique Roman intaglio in the bezel. Based on the finds, the burial is thought to be of 6th century date. Two masses of what was thought to be human hair were also found.

The knowledge of this grave assisted archaeologist Basil Brown to understand the nature of the nearby Sutton Hoo burials as soon as he realised he was dealing with a boat-like structure. He visited Aldeburgh to inspect the finds on 20 July 1938, during the excavation of Sutton Hoo Mound 2, the plundered and disturbed mound which was shown by many loosely-distributed iron rivets to have contained a boat, although no impression survived and the rivets were not in their original relative positions. He was therefore fully aware of the meaning of the rivets when he discovered them again, this time in situ, on 11 May 1939 when opening the mound which contained the undisturbed ship-burial. He was also well aware that the Snape burial was of early Anglo-Saxon, not of Viking age date, and this was part of the evidence which already in 1938 was convincing Basil Brown and his friend and principal employer Guy Maynard (Curator of Ipswich Museum 1920-1952) that the burials at Sutton Hoo were of similarly early date.

The finds and records from the excavation are held in the Aldeburgh Moot Hall Museum

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[edit] References

  • Bruce-Mitford, R. 'The Snape Boat-Grave' in Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology - Sutton Hoo and other Discoveries (1974)
  • Filmer-Sankey, W. 'Snape Anglo-Saxon cemetery - the current state of knowledge'in M.Carver, The Age of Sutton Hoo (1992), 39-51
  • Filmer-Sankey, W. 'Snape' in Current Archaeology 118 (1990)
  • Filmer-Sankey, W., and Pestell, T., Snape Anglo-Saxon Cemetery: Excavations and Surveys 1824-1992, East Anglian Archaeology 1995.
  • Hele, Dr N. Fenwick, Notes or Jottings about Aldeburgh (Aldeburgh 1870)