There was a gold clasp engraved with intricately intertwined snakes and beasts – a piece so extraordinary that the British Museum’s keeper of medieval antiquities nearly collapsed when he saw it; Jeweled shoulder buckles and belt fittings; a beautiful, decorated helmet with a full-face mask – the haunting face of an old hero who seems to gaze through the ages.
What the discovery meant
Brown’s find literally caused the history books to be rewritten. The ship and its contents were, it turned out, from the Dark Ages, and the discovery illuminated those 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 during this time were considered a primitive and backward people – almost primitive – but here were exquisitely made objects of great beauty. This was a society that valued skill, craft and art, and traded with Europe and beyond.
And these remnants of a sophisticated, lost civilization emerged when ours was threatened with destruction by the Nazis. The chief archaeologist gave a speech to site visitors and had to shout to be heard over 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 hit TV series, found out that Piggott, his aunt, had been involved in the dig, he did research into the story and immediately recognized what a rich seam it produced for a novelist. The Dig was critically acclaimed in 2007. Robert Harris called it “a true literary treasure”, and Ian McEwan called it “very beautiful, compelling, superbly original”.
Producer Ellie Wood, who has previously worked on a number of TV adaptations, including Decline and Fall, Bleak House, and The Line of Beauty, says she wanted to make a movie version as soon as she read the novel’s manuscript in 2006, before that. was even published.