There was a gold buckle engraved with snakes and animals intricately interwoven – a piece so extraordinary that the keeper of medieval antiquities at the British Museum almost fainted when he saw it; Shoulder clasps and belt accessories with jewelry; a wonderful, ornate helmet with an entire face mask – the scary face of some ancient hero who seems to behold the centuries.
What discovery means
Brown’s discovery literally caused the history books to be rewritten. The ship and its contents were reportedly from the Dark Ages, and the discovery illuminated those four centuries between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Vikings, about whom so little was known. The Anglo-Saxons who ruled the various kingdoms of England during that time were considered a rude and backward people – almost primitive – but here were exquisitely made items of great beauty. This was a society that valued skill, crafts and art, and that traded with Europe and beyond.
And these relics of a lost and sophisticated civilization appeared at a time when ours was being threatened with obliteration by the Nazis. The leading archeologist gave a speech to visitors to the site and had to shout to be heard over the roar of a Spitfire.
When author and journalist John Preston, whose book on British political wretch Jeremy Thorpe, A Very English Scandal, was recently adapted for a successful TV series, found that Piggott, his aunt, was involved in the excavation, he researched the story and immediately recognized the rich stitching it provided to a novelist. The Dig was published to acclaim in 2007. Robert Harris called it “a true literary treasure”, and Ian McEwan proclaimed it “very good, engaging, exquisitely original”.
Producer Ellie Wood, who has worked on a series of TV adaptations including Decline and Fall, Bleak House and The Line of Beauty, says she wanted to make a film version as soon as she read the novel’s manuscript in 2006 before that. it was even published.