Exhibition shows artefacts from Anglo-Saxon cemetery

A new exhibition is reuniting dozens of Anglo‑Saxon artefacts from a burial ground in Nottinghamshire for the first time in more than half a century.

The University of Nottingham Museum and Nottingham City Museums are bringing together 40 excavated discoveries from the early medieval cemetery at Broughton Lodge in Willoughby-on-the-Wolds.

The site, which was excavated between 1948 and 1968, contained about 120 graves dating from 475 to 580AD and is recognised as one of the most "exceptional cemeteries of its date", the university said.

The free exhibition opened on Friday and runs until 12 July at the University of Nottingham Museum at Lakeside Arts.

The exhibition will display raw materials from the Baltic Sea, Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, linking Nottinghamshire to "global networks of exchange".

Some of those artefacts include elephant ivory purse rings, traced to elephants likely to be from eastern Africa, and gilded brooches made from materials from the Byzantine world, which covered modern-day Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, Egypt, Syria and North Africa.

Prof Christopher Loveluck said the exhibition would create a picture of a Nottinghamshire community with pan-European connections in the 6th Century.

"The remains of the 6th Century community at Broughton Lodge show us people in Nottinghamshire using objects and materials imported via river and sea routes from across Europe, the Baltic and Mediterranean seas, in a time of abrupt climate change and pandemics that has resonance with the present day," he said.

Ann Inscker, curator of human history at Nottingham City Museums, said: "The Broughton Lodge excavations are a fantastic example of the power of a local community to save their own threatened heritage, unearthing what turned out to be one of the most important Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in the country.

"This new exhibition demonstrates community archaeology at its very best and I am delighted the public can enjoy the two collections together for the first time."

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