A fascinating story that featured back in March 2012.
From the Daily Mail:
Laid to rest in her best clothes and lying on an ornamental bed, she was probably of noble blood. Quite how the 16-year-old Anglo Saxon girl died and who she was remain a mystery. But she was buried wearing a gold cross – suggesting she was one of Britain’s earliest Christians.
Her well-preserved 1,400-year-old grave has been discovered by Cambridge University scientists, who described the find as ‘astonishing’.
The burial site at Trumpington Meadows, a village near Cambridge, indicates Christianity had already taken root in the area as early as the middle of the 7th century.
The grave is one of 13 Anglo Saxon ‘bed burials’ to be discovered. Usually reserved for noble women, they involved being laid to rest on a wood and metal frame topped with a straw mattress. Such burials are not found after the 7th century. The girl’s inch-wide gold cross, studded with cut garnets, has been dated to between 650 and 680AD.
From BBC News:
An Anglo-Saxon grave discovered near Cambridge could be one of the earliest examples of Christianity taking over from Paganism, archaeologists said.
The skeleton of a teenage girl was found buried on a wooden bed, with a gold and garnet cross on her chest.
The grave is thought to date from the mid-7th Century AD, when Christianity was beginning to be introduced to the Pagan Anglo-Saxon kings.
It was uncovered at Trumpington Meadows by Cambridge Archaeological Unit.
The cross is only the fifth to be discovered in the UK.
2 comments:
I would be interested to know how they will be treating the body and relics found in the grave. It seems like it would be grave-robbing to take the objects and put them in a museum, especially since the body has been undisturbed for over 1000 years.
thanks! :)
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