How has Archaeology Revealed Anglo-Saxon Rendlesham?

Rendlesham Revealed: The Heart of a Kingdom AD 400-800 is a new exhibition at the National Trust’s Sutton Hoo. It tells the story of an Anglo-Saxon royal settlement in Suffolk, the largest and wealthiest of its time in England. The exhibition is part of the community archaeology project Rendlesham Revealed: Anglo-Saxon Life in South-East Suffolk, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Original Briefing To show how Archaeologists found Anglo-Saxon Rendlesham. Create a video using a mixture of animation, real-life images of objects, and film footage of the archaeology techniques being used to show how Anglo-Saxon Rendlesham was found by Archaeologists. Use animation to show what happened in the past and photo/video for the present-day investigation. Audience: Key stage 2 primary school children Length: Approx 2mins. The idea After 12 years of archaeological investigation, SCC Archaeological services have identified the site of the early East Anglian royal settlement at Rendlesham, first mentioned in the 7th century by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Work is being undertaken in 2020-2024 as part of the community archaeology project Rendlesham Revealed, during which a library of video and photos of the discovery and excavation process has been built. These assets were crucial records of how archaeologists used archaeology to discover the history at Rendlesham, and it was made a requirement to show some of these assets in the video. We were to start the video with illustrations to interpret what Anglo-Saxon Rendlesham may have looked like. Donna Wreathall had created an artist's impression of what a Royal Hall at Rendlesham could look like. Including Donna’s illustration in the intro of the video, the animation needed a lot more illustrations to tell the Anglo-Saxon story, so following Donna's black and white, line and dot shading illustration style, I created the other illustrations of huts, marketplace, animals, farmers, families and tradespeople for the video. During the excavations in 2022, a royal hall of "international importance" dating back 1,400 years was discovered. This quite significantly changed what we already knew about the hall, so Donna went back to her original hall drawing and re-created it to what we now knew—thus, it was a much larger, more grand hall, which then had to be shown accurately within the animation. The end of the video was to wrap up the history and bring it to the modern day, showing the recent excavations and history being discovered. The footage and photographs were used to show the archaeologists and the community volunteers coming together to unearth the past and make a record of it forever. My role: Producer, editor, motion designer and illustrator. Music by Gemma Parker. Illustration of the royal hall by Donna Wreathall.