It is impossible to hear the name Suffolk without thinking of the stunning early medieval archaeology of the county. Sutton Hoo was internationally famous within the archaeological community long before the movie The Dig introduced it to a new global audience – see the review in CA 373 (April 2021). I have visited this site twice before, in CA 339 (June 2018) and CA 355 (October 2019), though, so I will focus in this month’s column on exploring other, lesser-known sites, finds, and communities across Suffolk.
Perfectly preserved Pakefield
To begin at the beginning, I turn first to the Suffolk coast and the array of prehistoric, especially Palaeolithic, sites and finds made over the years around Pakefield and Happisburgh on the Suffolk/Norfolk border. I covered some of this ground in my previous columns on Norfolk (see CA 363 and CA 364, June and July 2020), and, for those of you keen to explore the magazine’s coverage further, there are great surveys of some of the most important Palaeolithic sites in the whole of north-west Europe in CA 201 (January/February 2001), CA 232 (July 2009), and CA 288 (March 2014). These tell the tale of the very earliest people to settle in what in time became the British Isles, back when the land- and seascape was different: the vast plains of Doggerland, which once linked Britain to continental Europe, having since been lost to the North Sea.
Torc of the town
Moving on in time and place, I shift from Palaeolithic Pakefield to Iron Age Ipswich. CA 17 (November 1969) reported on the discovery of five torcs in the area, dating to the 1st century BC, discovered by a sharp-eyed bulldozer driver who spotted them when working on a housing estate on the edge of the town in September 1968 and responsibly reported them to Ipswich Museum. The torcs were passed to the British Museum, and the finder was rewarded with their estimated value: £45,000 in 1969, equivalent to around £665,000 today – at that time the largest such ‘treasure’ payment ever made.
