There is one main character who doesn’t get any screen time, unfortunately. The helmet of King Raedwald found at Sutton Hoo in 1939. There are no bad performances in this movie, and it’s worth watching for that reason alone. Carey Mulligan also provides a stand-out performance as a woman torn between her family legacy and the desire to discover something truly life-affirming, despite being cast as a woman who in reality was in her late 50s.
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Without Fiennes’ expert restraint as an actor, and the ability to show his characters’ motivations through his eyes and few words, I doubt the movie would have succeeded. It has to be said outright that Fiennes’ Basil Brown is a perfect study of the understated English working class of the time that “just got on with it” despite all the turmoil and growing horror that was gripping Europe-shown in the movie by the occasional Spitfire squadron flying overhead during the Battle of Britain. Having been on many digs, this sometimes happens and when it does it’s memorable. What really struck a chord with me was the quiet anticipation, and the slow-burning drama between all the characters. It captures so much in such a short space of time that it’s difficult to recount it all here. Suffolk County Council ArchivesĪs both an early medievalist and a fan-boy, I loved this movie. Two of the assistants, Stuart (Ben Chaplin) and Margaret “Peggy” Piggott (Lily James), are the subject of a key side story in the second half of the movie.īasil Brown was a local archaeologist, who is most famous for his excavations of the burial mounds at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. British Museum archaeologist CW Philips leads this effort and is joined by a virtual pantheon of archaeologists who would in their own right come to define prehistoric and early medieval archaeology for decades to come. Despite setbacks (trigger warning: this is not a film for people afraid of being buried alive!), the small team of diggers uncover the single greatest discovery of early medieval archaeology to that point, and arguably to this day: a buried ship containing at its center the remnants of a burial.Īs word of the discovery gets out, the local museum and the British Museum in London send in “professional” archaeologists to take over. There develops a sense of community and even family surrounding the dig, mostly through Edith’s 10-year-old son Robert (Archie Barns) who looks to Basil as a father figure. Basil and Edith quickly develop a close friendship, despite their noticeable class differences, through their excitement for the dig and love of archaeology. The understated, humble, but extremely knowledgeable Basil begins very simply by laying out a trench and cutting the turf with a mattock. She enlists the help of a local amateur “excavator” Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) to help her reveal the mysteries of the earthworks.
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The movie recounts the efforts in 1939 of the aristocratic landowner Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) to investigate a series of strange mounds on her Sutton Hoo estate. The Dig channels everything about early medieval archaeology that I love: the mystery, the glamor, and even the extraordinary characters of previous generations of archaeologists that I’ve come to know through their work. When I saw that Netflix would bring me the story of the greatest early medieval discovery of the 20th century-a royal Anglo-Saxon boat burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk-I was beyond excited. in the subject, and a 20-year stint living in Scotland and absorbing it in my bones.
Both movies led me to a fascination with the archaeology of early medieval (roughly 450–1100 AD) Britain, a Ph.D. The second was Excalibur, with its moody medieval vignettes channeling Glam Rock while echoing Sir Thomas Malory’s romantic epic Le Morte d’Arthur. The first was Raiders of the Lost Ark, which, along with my dad’s insistence that we visit every single frontier fort in Colorado and Wyoming, led me towards a lifelong love of archaeology. When I was growing up on the Front Range in the 1980s, two movies profoundly impacted my life. Archaeologist Chris Bowles reviews the film and provides additional context to the history of the excavation and the overall discovery. Netflix released the drama film The Dig on January 29. Contact National & State Register Staff.
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