Royal Burial Site Found in Southend-on-Sea

This was a Time Team Special in 2005 [Series 18, Episode 138], unfortunately named the "King of Bling". The location was given as Prittlewell, Essex [on the outskirts of Southend]. For non-Brits, Time Team has been a very long-running series on British TV, popularising field archeology to a very wide audience. It took a 'quick hit' approach following-up local suggestions to do a single week's digging with good resources. It reported the week's progress in a single, compact and well-structured broadcast. Much loved, it is now in hiatus, if not gone forever. Why it was not mentioned in connection with this 'discovery' is hard to say...

&gt;But it has been possible. The Mola team estimates it would have taken 20 to 25 men working five or six days in different groups to build the chamber and would have involved felling 13 oak trees.<p>&gt;“It was a significant communal effort,” said Jackson. “You’ve got to see this burial chamber as a piece of theatre. It is sending out a very strong message to the people who come and look at it and the stories they take away from it. It says ‘we are very important people and we are burying one of our most important people’.”<p>That doesn&#x27;t really seem like all <i>that</i> much effort. Especially for an era where there was significant downtime between harvest cycles.

I&#x27;m not one to whinge about headlines much, but with UK conditions, &quot;Equivalent to Tutankhamun&quot; is one hell of a stretch. Very little gets preserved like in dry Egyptian sand here.<p>Significant and fascinating, certainly.

Also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-england-essex-48203883" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-england-essex-48203883</a>, via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19866621" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19866621</a>.

I found the design of the drinking cups to be interesting. They are made from wood in a globular design, but the edges where your lips would touch are all covered in rounded metals to make it more comfortable than potentially sharp wood. It also uses little metal latches to seal onto the wood which they stylized.

Fascinating story and a great bit of archaeology, but it’s very strange seeing my hometown featured on HN.

I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d call it equivalent to Tutankhamun&#x27;s crypt given the vast difference in age, and in the number of artifacts found and their condition, organic and non-organic, but it is a great historical find, none-the-less.

This was found in 2003. I hate misleading titles.