Rendlesham Revealed: An East Anglian royal centre Christopher Scull
Event details
In 2007, illegal metal-detecting alerted archaeologists to a site of exceptional importance at Rendlesham in south-east Suffolk – the 7th-century East Anglian royal centre mentioned by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
Fifteen years of archaeological investigation, co-ordinated by Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service, has shown it to be the largest and wealthiest settlement of its time known in England: a royal residence and jurisdictional centre, and almost certainly the place from which the rulers buried at Sutton Hoo exercised their power in this part of the East Anglian kingdom.
Fieldwork culminated in 2021–2023 with three seasons of excavation, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund through the community archaeology project Rendlesham Revealed, which unearthed a royal hall and a possible pre-Christian cult building.
Archaeologist Christopher Scull of UCL, the project’s principal academic advisor, will be your guide to the journey of discovery and will explain what the results mean for how we understand early England in the years CE 400–800.
Photo credit: Jim Pullen © Suffolk County Council
About the speaker
Christopher Scull is a researcher specialising in the early medieval archaeology of north-west Europe. Over the course of his career he has held academic posts at Durham University and University College London, and was Research Director at English Heritage until 2010. Since then he has been Director of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and is currently an Honorary Visiting Professor at the School of History, Archaeology and Religion, Cardiff University, and an Honorary Professor of Practice at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He has been involved in the Rendlesham project as its principal academic advisor since 2012.
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