Vessel for the Dead

During the Hiberno-Saxon period in England and the Vendel era on mainland Europe, a simple grave wouldn't cut it.  A common practice for the burial of Kings and other important figures, normally connected to the 'military' at the time, was to pack a ship with all the gold and other valuables they could find and send it off to sea or bury it.  The picture to the left is a painting of a funeral of a Russian noble by Henryk Siemiradzki.  If you were lucky, they maybe set it on fire.  Obviously this waste of gold is the main source of our current hike in gold prices.

Used all across the Baltic Sea, the most famous burial site is Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge, Suffolk, England.  Scholars often draw connections between this burial and the one described in the English poem Beowulf.  This find is significant for a couple reasons. Though many other burial sites in this area have been found, all of them have been looted.  The burial ship at Sutton Hoo had remained untouched by looters, so the find has left us with a plethora of artifacts from the time.  Because this was an age where history was not recorded as diligently as others and most of it was passed on through myths, the hard evidence from this discovery is critical to the understanding of this period.

The site at Sutton Hoo is composed of both  burial mounds and the more famous ship burial.  The ship used has long disintegrated but the outline was left in the sand.  Archaeologist believe that it measured 90ft long, 14ft at its widest point and about 5ft deep.  However, the buriers were feeling 'hipster' that day and decided that burying a boat on land would be cool.  Most the artifacts are held in the burial chamber, which was a very heavy oak container that was set in the middle of the boat.  It was originally thought that there was no body, but modern day tests have shown that the is a very high probability one existed.  Buried with the ship were helmets, silver bowls and spoons, swords, spears, purse, shoulder clasp, great buckle and many other thing like textiles.  The ship was then covered by a large earthen mound that finally put this ship to rest.