The location of the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo, on a ridge
overlooking the estuary of the river Deben, has always appeared strange
and challenging. This is not so much because the site is today an
isolated and lonely one, but rather because it lies on the very
periphery of the early medieval kingdom of East Anglia, whose rulers -
the Wuffingas - were buried there. In this extended meditation on the
geography of a very special and evocative place, Tom Williamson explores
the meaning of the cemetery's location. To understand the location of
ancient monuments we need to examine not only the character of past
landscapes, but also the ways that contemporaries may have experienced
and felt about them: we need to reconstruct aspects of their mental
world. Williamson argues that the cemetery was placed where it was not
in order to display power and dominance over territory, but because the
river, and its brooding estuary, had long held a special and central
place in the lives and perceptions of a local society. As King Raedwald
and his family rose to dominance over this river-people, they chose to
be buried at the heart of their territory. Such approaches may help us
to understand why the cemetery was established where it was within the
territory of the Wuffingas: but they cannot explain why that group came
to dominate the whole of East Anglia. For this, Williamson argues, we
need to examine wider geographical contexts - patterns of movement,
contact, and social allegiance which were engendered and shaped by
landforms and topography at a regional and national level. It is only by
joining aspects of the new 'phenomenological' approaches to the
archaeology of landscape, to more traditional geographical
interpretations, that we can appreciate the full significance of this
important site. Combining a keen understanding of local and regional
geography, Anglo-Saxon history, and current debates about approaches to
past landscapes, this book is a masterly exploration of the context and
meaning of an iconic set of monuments.
