Medievalists.net provides a collection of articles on the recently publicized find of buried Anglo-Saxon gold and silver and enameled artifacts known as the Staffordshire Hoard, starting with How the Staffordshire Hoard was Discovered.
From their collection of scholarly experts’ opinions on the signficance of this archaeological discovery:
Leslie Webster, formerly Keeper at the British Museum and the leading expert on artefacts of this period:
This hoard is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England in the seventh and early eighth century as radically, if not more so, as the 1939 Sutton Hoo discoveries did; it will make historians and literary scholars review what their sources tell us, and archaeologists and art-historians rethink the chronology of metalwork and mss; and it will make us all think again about rising (and failing) kingdoms and the expression of regional identities in this period, the complicated transition from paganism to Christianity, the conduct of battle and the nature of fine metalwork production – to name only a few of the many huge issues it raises. Absolutely the metalwork equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells.
Coincidentally, 2009 marks the 70th year of the discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial.
