The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. The British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge.
Sutton Hoo is the site of two Anglo-Saxon cemeteries dating from the 6th to 7th centuries near Woodbridge, Suffolk, England. Archaeologists have been excavating the area since 1938, when a previously undisturbed ship burial containing a wealth of Anglo-Saxon artefacts was discovered. The site is important in establishing the history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of East Anglia as well as illuminating the Anglo-Saxons during a period which lacks historical documentation.
A tumulus is a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Tumuli are also known as barrows, burial mounds or kurgans, and may be found throughout much of the world. A cairn, which is a mound of stones built for various purposes, may also originally have been a tumulus.
Lindholm Høje is a major Viking burial site and former settlement situated to the north of and overlooking the city of Aalborg in Denmark.
The Prittlewell royal Anglo-Saxon burial or Prittlewell princely burial is a high-status Anglo-Saxon burial mound which was excavated at Prittlewell, north of Southend-on-Sea, in the English county of Essex.
Norse funerals, or the burial customs of Viking Age North Germanic Norsemen, are known both from archaeology and from historical accounts such as the Icelandic sagas and Old Norse poetry.
Viking art, also known commonly as Norse art, is a term widely accepted for the art of Scandinavian Norsemen and Viking settlements further afield—particularly in the British Isles and Iceland—during the Viking Age of the 8th-11th centuries. Viking art has many design elements in common with Celtic, Germanic, the later Romanesque and Eastern European art, sharing many influences with each of these traditions.
The Staffordshire Hoard is the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork yet found. It consists of almost 4,600 items and metal fragments, amounting to a total of 5.1 kg (11 lb) of gold, 1.4 kg (3 lb) of silver and some 3,500 pieces of garnet cloisonné jewellery. It is described by the historian Cat Jarman as "possibly the finest collection of early medieval artefacts ever discovered".
The Sutton Hoo purse-lid is one of the major objects excavated from the Anglo-Saxon royal burial-ground at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England. The site contains a collection of burial mounds, of which much the most significant is the undisturbed ship burial in Mound 1 containing very rich grave goods including the purse-lid. The person buried in Mound 1 is usually thought to have been Rædwald, King of East Anglia, who died around 624. The purse-lid is considered to be "one of the most remarkable creations of the early medieval period." About seven and a half inches long, it is decorated with beautiful ornament in gold and garnet cloisonné enamel, and was undoubtedly a symbol of great wealth and status. In 2017 the purse-lid was on display at the British Museum.
The National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology is a branch of the National Museum of Ireland located on Kildare Street in Dublin, Ireland, that specialises in Irish and other antiquities dating from the Stone Age to the Late Middle Ages.
The Port an Eilean Mhòir boat burial is a Viking boat burial site in Ardnamurchan, Scotland, the most westerly point on the island of Great Britain. Dated to the 10th century, the burial consists of a Viking boat about 5 metres long by 1.5 metres (5 ft) wide in which a man was laid to rest with his shield, sword and spear as well as other grave goods.
The Scar boat burial is a Viking boat burial near the village of Scar, on Sanday, in Orkney, Scotland. The burial, which dates to between 875 and 950 AD, contained the remains of a man, an elderly woman, and a child, along with numerous grave goods. Although the site had to be excavated quickly because of the threat of coastal erosion owing to bad weather conditions, it yielded many important finds.
Art in Medieval Scotland includes all forms of artistic production within the modern borders of Scotland, between the fifth century and the adoption of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century. In the early Middle Ages, there were distinct material cultures evident in the different federations and kingdoms within what is now Scotland. Pictish art was the only uniquely Scottish Medieval style; it can be seen in the extensive survival of carved stones, particularly in the north and east of the country, which hold a variety of recurring images and patterns. It can also be seen in elaborate metal work that largely survives in buried hoards. Irish-Scots art from the kingdom of Dál Riata suggests that it was one of the places, as a crossroads between cultures, where the Insular style developed.
The Tromsø Burial or Tromsø Grave Group is a significant hoard of Viking objects found near Tromsø, in the far north of Norway, in the late nineteenth century. Since 1900, the group has been part of the British Museum's early medieval collection.
James Graham-Campbell, is a British archaeologist, medievalist, and academic, specialising in the Viking Age. He lectured at University College Dublin and University College London (UCL), rising to be Professor of Medieval Archaeology at UCL from 1991 to 2002: he is now professor emeritus.
The archaeology of Wales is the study of human occupation within the country of Wales which has been occupied by modern humans since 225,000 BCE, with continuous occupation from 9,000 BCE. Analysis of the sites, artefacts and other archaeological data within Wales details its complex social landscape and evolution from Prehistoric times to the Industrial period. This study is undertaken by academic institutions, consultancies, charities as well as government organisations.
Angela Care Evans,, is an archaeologist and former Curator in the department of Britain, Europe, and Prehistory at the British Museum. She has published extensively on the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 artefacts and early medieval metalwork.
The Orkney Museum, formerly Tankerness House Museum, is a history museum in Kirkwall, Orkney, Scotland. Run by Orkney Islands Council, the museum covers the history of the Orkney Islands from the Stone Age through the Picts and Vikings to the present day.
The Clonmacnoise Crozier is a late-11th-century Insular crozier that would have been used as a ceremonial staff for bishops and mitred abbots. Its origins and medieval provenance are unknown. It was likely discovered in the late 18th or early 19th century in the monastery of Clonmacnoise in County Offaly, Ireland. The crozier has two main parts: a long shaft and a curved crook. Its style reflects elements of Viking art, especially the snake-like animals in figure-of-eight patterns running on the sides of the body of the crook, and the ribbon of dog-like animals in openwork that form the crest at its top. Apart from a shortening to the staff length and the loss of some inserted gems, it is largely intact and is one of the best-preserved surviving pieces of Insular metalwork.
The Talnotrie Hoard is a 9th-century mixed hoard of jewellery, coinage, metal-working objects and raw materials found in Talnotrie, Scotland, in 1912. Initially assumed to have belonged to a Northumbrian metal-worker, more recent interpretations associate its deposition with the activities of the Viking Great Army.
Whalebone plaque from the Lilleberge grave group as displayed in the British Museum