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There was a gold buckle engraved with intricately interwoven snakes and beasts – a piece so extraordinary that the British Museum’s keeper of medieval antiquities almost collapsed upon seeing it; jeweled shoulder clasps and belt fittings; a magnificent ornate helmet with a full face mask – the haunting face of an ancient hero appearing to look through the centuries.
What the discovery meant
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 shed light on the four centuries between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Vikings, about which so little was known. The Anglo-Saxons who ruled the various kingdoms of England at this time had been considered a rudimentary and backward people – almost primitive – but here were objects of great beauty. It was a company that valued skills, crafts and art, and traded with Europe and beyond.
And these relics of a sophisticated and lost civilization appeared just as our own was threatened with annihilation by the Nazis. The senior archaeologist gave a speech to visitors to the site and had to shout to be heard above the roar of a Spitfire.
When author and journalist John Preston, whose book on disgraced British politician Jeremy Thorpe, A Very English Scandal, was recently adapted into a successful television series, discovered that Piggott, his aunt, had been involved in the digs, he researched history and immediately recognized the wealth of tailoring that this offered to a novelist. The Dig was successfully published in 2007. Robert Harris called it a “literary treasure trove”, and Ian McEwan proclaimed it “very fine, captivating, delightfully original”.
Producer Ellie Wood, who has worked on a number of TV adaptations before, 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. has even been published.
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