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Street House, Loftus. In-depth Information The main structure was 12.8m in diameter, with two entrances; one facing SE and the other facing SW. This roundhouse had been rebuilt on two separate occasions between 210-40BC. Intriguingly, although traces of Iron Age floor surfaces survived within the structure, there were very few finds of pottery, jewellery or other domestic artefacts. Elsewhere on site corn grinding stones, seeds from crops, (eg. spelt wheat and barley) pieces of jet jewellery and an iron spearhead were found. Uniquely in Yorkshire, the inhabitants of this village were manufacturing salt by evaporating seawater in pottery containers, known as briquetage, set over open fires. At this time salt was a very important and valuable product used in curing and preserving meat and fish, which may explain why it was manufactured within the settlement, high on the cliff top, rather than on the beach! Quantities of briquetage have been found at other Late Iron Age sites in the Tees Valley area, some over 40km from Street House, showing that salt was regularly traded or exchanged between communities in this region. Elsewhere, in the West Midlands for example, salt was traded up to 80km from manufacturing sites. The evidence for Roman activity is so far confined to an enclosure to the SW of the Iron Age enclosure. Although this area has only been briefly investigated, sherds of pottery found there suggest a Roman date. One of the greatest surprises of the excavation was the discovery of a Royal Anglo-Saxon cemetery within the Iron Age enclosure. No human bones were found due to the acidic nature of the soil, however, some of the graves did contain some very distinctive glass, jet and amber beads. In 2005 thirty graves were excavated and it was initially thought this was part of a long row of graves, typical of other seventh century cemetery sites. In 2006, during further excavations of the Iron Age site another group of graves was found including a bed burial. A bed burial is the ritual of laying a person, usually of high status and often female, in a chamber upon a wooden bed. The Street House bed burial, that of a lady, contained two superb cabochon pendants and a gold shield-shaped pendant, a unique artefact unparalleled in Anglo-Saxon England. The workmanship on this and other jewellery found in the graves, suggests the people buried here had access to some of the best craftsmen in Anglo-Saxon England. A Royal burial? The final intriguing aspect about the Street House cemetery is the plan of the graveyard. This shows that the graves are quite neatly aligned and evenly spaced suggesting they were all laid out at the same time. In addition to the bed burial, there were also five other high-status graves, a clear indication that the people here had royal connections. We believe that the lady buried upon the bed was of royal status and that the rest of the “royal” cemetery was arranged around her grave. For a time prior to the funeral, this Anglo-Saxon “princess” may have been lain “in waiting” in a wooden building known as a grubenhaus . This would have allowed her distant relatives to be informed about her death and given them time to make the journey to attend the ceremony. But the question still remains – who was this princess and why was she buried on the cliff top at Street House, Loftus? |
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