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A 1,300-year-old gold and jewel necklace found on the site of a new housing development marks the grave of a powerful woman who may have been an early Christian religious leader in Britain, archaeologists said on Tuesday.
Experts say the necklace, along with other items near Northampton in central England, is part of the most important burial of a medieval woman found in the UK.
Qin Cheng / AP
The woman is long gone – little tooth enamel remains. But scientists say her long-buried body will shed new light on life in 7th-century England, a time when Christianity was battling paganism for people’s allegiance.
The objects are “a definitive statement of wealth as well as Christian faith,” said Lynn Blakemore, senior finds specialist at the Museum of London Archaeology, who made the discovery.
“She was extremely devout, but was she a princess? Was she a nun? Was she more than a nun — a nun? … We don’t know,” Blakemore said.
The Harpole Treasure – named for the village where it was found – was discovered in April by archaeologists working with property developer Wistry Group in a neighborhood of new houses, about 60 miles northwest of London.
On one of the last days of the 10-week excavation, site supervisor Levante-Bence Balazs noticed something shining in the dirt.
“When the first glimmers of gold started coming out of the soil, we knew this was something significant,” Balazs said, according to the BBC. “However, we had no idea how special this would be.”
It turned out to be a rectangular gold pendant with a cross motif, studded with garnets – the centerpiece of a necklace that also had pendants made from gold Roman coins and ovals of semi-precious stones.
“These artifacts have not seen the light of day in over 1,300 years,” Balazs said. “To actually be the first person to see it — it’s just indescribable.”
Qin Cheng / AP
Researchers say the burial was made between 630 and 670 AD, the same period as several other graves of high-ranking women found around Britain. Previously high-status burials were mostly for men, and experts say the change could give women power and status in England’s New Christianity.
The Kingdom of Mercia, where the Harpole Treasure was found, converted to Christianity in the 7th century, and the woman buried there was a believer, perhaps a leader of the faith. A large and ornate silver cross was placed over his body in the grave. It is decorated with small, surprisingly well-preserved likenesses of human heads with blue glass eyes, which may represent Christ’s apostles. Pottery vessels from France or Belgium were also found, containing remains of an unknown liquid.
Within a few decades, as Christianity took hold more widely in England, the practice of burying people with their luxury goods ended.
“Burying people with lots and lots of bling is a pagan notion, but this is obviously heavily embedded in Christian iconography, so it’s a period of very rapid change,” said Simon Mortimer of the archaeological consultants RPS, who worked on the project.
Harpole’s discoveries will help fill a gap in knowledge about the era between the departure of Britain’s Roman occupiers in the 5th century and the arrival of Viking raiders some 400 years later. Experts say it is the most significant Saxon find since a 7th-century ship burial discovered 100 miles east at Sutton Hoo.
A handful of similar necklaces from the same period have previously been found in other regions of England, but “none as ornate as the Harpole treasure”, experts told the BBC. The closest parallel is the Desborough necklace, discovered in Northamptonshire in 1876 and now in the collection of the British Museum. is
Once the archaeologists have completed their work, the plan is to display the objects in a local museum.
Property developers in Britain are required to consult archaeologists as part of their planning process, and Mortimer said the practice had yielded some important discoveries.
“We’re now seeing places we would never normally have seen,” he said, and as a result “we’re finding really unexpected things.”
“The amount of wealth will change our view of the early medieval period in that area,” he added. “The course of history has been shortened, ever so slightly, by this discovery.”
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