A Conversion-Period Burial in an Ancient Landscape: A High-Status Female Grave near the Rollright Stones, Oxfordshire/Warwickshire

Abstract

In March 2015, a metal detector user uncovered several early medieval artefacts from land adjacent to the Rollright Stones, a major prehistoric complex that straddles the Oxfordshire—Warwickshire border (O.S. SP 2963 3089). He alerted the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the well-preserved burial of a female, aged around 25–35 years and aligned South-North, was subsequently excavated (Fig. 11.1).1 The grave—which was shallow, undisturbed (apart from a small area of disturbance near the skull caused by the detectorist) and produced no evidence for a coffin or other structures— contained a number of remarkable objects indicating a 7th-century date for the burial. This was confirmed by two samples of bone taken for AMS radiocarbon dating, which produced a combined date of 622–652 cal AD at 68.2 per cent probability and 604–656 cal AD at 95.4 per cent probability (OxA-37509, OxA-37510). The burial lay some 50 m northeast of a standing stone presumed to be prehistoric in date, known locally as the ‘King Stone’.2 This burial and its remarkable setting form a significant addition to the corpus of well-furnished female burials which are shedding new light on the role of women in Conversion-period England, about which Barbara Yorke has written so compellingly. At the time of writing, conservation of the artefacts from the burial has not begun and the brief description of the main objects provided here must therefore be regarded as provisional.3 The first and most striking object to be identified