At the 1,400-year-old Sutton Hoo boat burial site in England, archaeologists uncovered fragments of a copper bucket from the Byzantine Empire.
Byzantine bucket shards found at Sutton Hoo in England
During work carried out at Sutton Hoo, an Anglo-Saxon site in England, researchers discovered the missing pieces of a 1,500-year-old copper bucket imported from Turkey. The item, which is reportedly more than a century older than the ship on which it was found, could provide insight into how people lived in early medieval times.
Missing pieces of 6th-century Byzantine bucket finally found at Sutton Hoo
— SAMD (@SamDForever1) July 5, 2024
The collaboration of archaeologists, conservators, and volunteers from Time Team, the UK’s National Trust and FAS Heritage, uncovered the metal shards last month during excavation and metal-detection work at Sutton Hoo in England.
The site is primarily celebrated for its seventh-century ship burial, but the burial was just one part of a larger site featuring 18 burial mounds, found close to Suffolk in southeastern England. Many of the buried ships contained jewelry and coins.
Other items uncovered at Sutton Hoo include an Egyptian bowl, Eastern Mediterranean silverware, and a Middle Eastern petroleum product called bitumen.
The original bucket
However, the copper-alloy bucket, known as the Bromeswell Bucket, is a century older than the ship burial. The broken bucket, discovered in 1986, is adorned by a picture of a North African hunting scene featuring lions and a dog.
The Sutton Hoo bucket was probably made in the sixth century in Antioch, Turkey. At that time, it was part of the Byzantine Empire. An inscription in Greek on the bucket reads, “Use this in good health, Master Count, for many happy years.” This shows it could have been a diplomatic gift.
The items discovered last month were adorned with figures akin to those on the original find. As such, the team used X-ray fluorescence (XRF), used to determine elements present in objects to produce a singular elemental “fingerprint” of them, to clarify that the recently discovered fragments are definitely part of the sixth-century Bromeswell Bucket.
“Thanks to closer inspection, we now believe that the bucket had been previously damaged and then repaired,” Angus Wainwright, a regional archaeologist in the East of England for the National Trust, said in a statement. “In-depth analysis of the metals suggests it might even have been soldered back together.”
East Anglia has been inhabited since at least 3,000 BC, when Sutton Hoo was in use as a cemetery in the sixth and seventh centuries. It was densely populated and formed one part of a busy trade network.
The Sutton Hoo treasures comprise a diverse range of objects, including pagan and Christian artifacts, which made their way to the site from all over Europe and the Middle East.
