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I'm at Sutton Hoo, where in 1939 one of the most important and most exciting archaeological discoveries in Britain was made. It uncovered the tomb of an Anglo-Saxon who had been buried here in the early 600s, and it completely changed the way we thought about what had been called the "Dark Ages"-those centuries that followed the collapse of Roman rule in Britain.I'm with Angus Wainwright, the National Trust archaeologist for the East of England...what can we see of the site now?
我正位于萨顿胡，1939年夏，英国考古史上最激动人心的发现之一出现在距萨福克海岸数英里的萨顿胡。在一座公元七世纪早期的盎格鲁—撒克逊墓葬中发现的物品深远地改变了人们对所谓的“黑暗时代”，也就是罗马帝国在英国的统治崩溃之后那几个世纪的看法。国家信托组织的东安格利亚考古学家安格斯韦恩赖特描述了当地的景象：
"Well we're standing amongst a number of large mounds, high up on an exposed ridge looking down towards the River Deben. We're about 100 feet (30 m) up here, and we're standing next to one of the biggest mounds, which we call, excitingly, Mound 1, which is where the great ship grave was discovered in 1939. And we've got about 18 or 20 other mounds around us."
在一道约三十米高的山脊上坐落着几十个大土丘，俯视着德本河。那些最大的当中有一个被我们激动地称为土丘一号，1939年我们就是在那儿发现了大型船葬墓地。附近还有18至20个类似的土丘。
It was in this ship grave that the famous Sutton Hoo helmet was found. Surprisingly, there was no body, but in the ship's burial chamber there was an astonishing range of valuable goods drawn from all over Europe: weapons and armour, elaborate gold jewellery, silver vessels for feasting, and many, many coins. Nothing like this from Anglo-Saxon England had ever been found before.
著名的萨顿胡头盔便出土于这个船葬墓地，发掘工作给人们带来了一大谜团，坟墓里没有尸体。但同时出土的还有来自欧洲各地的数目惊人的珍宝：武器、盔甲、精美的黄金首饰以及宴会用的白银餐具和许多货币。之前从未发现过类似的盎格鲁-撒克逊时期的文物。
The discovery of this ship burial in the summer of 1939 captured the British public's imagination.
船葬的发现吸引了英国公众的注意力，
It was hailed as the "British Tutankhamun". But the politics of 1939 lent a disturbing dimension to the discovery: not only did the excavation have to be hurried because of the approaching war, but the burial itself spoke of an earlier, and successful, invasion of England by a Germanic-speaking people.
他们欢欣鼓舞，称之为“英国的图坦卡蒙”。但1939年的政治形势给这一发现带来了阴影：不仅仅因为战争邻近，挖掘工作不得不加快节奏，同时也因为墓葬本身便是历史上某个使用日耳曼语的民族成功人侵英国所留下的痕迹。
Here's Angus Wainwright again... what did they actually discover when they excavated in 1939?:
安格斯?韦 恩赖特记录了他们的发现：
"The first thing they discovered very early on in the excavation were ship rivets-these are the iron rivets that hold together the planks of a ship. They also discovered that the wood that had made up the ship had rotted completely away, but by a rather mysterious process, the shape of the wood was preserved in a kind of crusted blackened sand, so by careful excavation they gradually uncovered the whole ship.
挖掘工作伊始，人们便发现了船只使用的铆钉，那是用来将船板固定在一起的钉子。同时他们也发现所有的船板都已完全腐烂，但由于一个神秘的过程，船的形状以一种陈年黑沙的形式被完整地保留了下来。因此，在小心地挖掘之后人们逐渐挖出了整艘船。
