Excavation of a stone palace complex on the Tintagel peninsula

June 16, 2024 6:36 AM

English Heritage’s Properties Curator, Win Scutt said: “These finds reveal a fascinating insight into the lives of those at Tintagel Castle more than 1,500 years ago. It is easy to assume that the fall of the Roman Empire threw Britain into obscurity, but here on this dramatic Cornish cliff top they built substantial stone buildings, used fine table wares from Turkey, drank from decorated Spanish glassware and feasted on pork, fish and oysters." 2016 excavations report. Guardian article about a truly extraordinary window ledge inscription from the 7th century. More about Tintagel for folks who've never heard of it.

This post brought to you courtesy of the Secrets of the Dead 2019 episode on 5th-7th century Britain.

Arthur previously.

posted by cupcakeninja (10 comments total)

Really taken with this episode of a show I watch occasionally. Generally reasonable claims, multiple instances of professionals saying "we don't know" about things that they don't know, and some really thoughtful contrasts drawn between trade streams in eastern and western Britain in the 5th-7th centuries and the nature of the societies there, insofar as they could draw conclusions. The episode on the origin of "The First Circle of Stonehenge," exploring where it was quarried and initially erected, was also good, showcasing a range of archaeological & geophysical analysis methods for the conclusions discussed.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:43 AM on June 16 [1 favorite]

King Arthur is long dead, Tintagel lives on. Many years ago, I had a job driving a 2 tonne van, delivering books to schools in SW England. After the first month I reported back to head-office and my line manager (!!) advised me that if I altered receipts like
a night's B&B = £1.50
to
3 night's B&B = £4.50
then I could claim 3 per diems and sleep in the back of the van . . . just a suggestion, he muttered, they pay you nothing & sixpence and you're registering a significant profit for the company. Next accounting season, I brought a mat and a sleeping bag and only slept in B&Bs that were precisely £1.50. The other mornings I woke up in some really nice places and some scuzzy municipal car-parks. Once, memorably, I picked up two hitch-hiking sailors on leave from Plymouth and we finished up getting legless in Tintagel. We all three fell dead drunk into the van long after midnight and woke to a spectacular cliff-top view full of Arthurian romance. So I slept with two sailors in Tintagel; I didn't sleep with them.
posted by BobTheScientist at 7:18 AM on June 16 [22 favorites]

The other Tantagel Castle theme
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:15 AM on June 16

The other Tantagel Castle theme

Thank you I could not figure out why the name was so familiar.
posted by curious nu at 9:58 AM on June 16

My overwhelming memory of Tintagel is an older man hiding a 50p coin in the grass and claiming I'd found King Arthur's buried treasure when I uncovered it - definitely deserves another visit almost 30 years later...
posted by terretu at 11:00 AM on June 16 [5 favorites]

wrt Preliminary interpretations suggested
by these readings suggested the presence of “specialist” buildings, perhaps industrial
workshops for craft-making which required intense heat and/or furnaces (Roseveare
et al 2016), but little direct evidence for this was found in the 2016 evaluations. The
marked absence of any metallurgical detritus and waste was notable (the soil residues
both wet and dry sieved were scanned by a magnet for hammer scale during fieldwork
as well as during sorting the coarse residues during post excavation). Another possible
explanation could be offered and this may relate to the evidence for abandonment
and demolition of the area (as suggested by the thick levelled layers of good-sized
(structural) slates which lay across the entire surface areas of both trenches here on the
southern terrace and ensured the remarkable survival of intact stone walls and floors).
If fire had played a part in these events then perhaps this caused the high readings.
Both ideas are at the stage speculative and will be tested in future work.
might the flagged slate floor, on page 45, be for working (exported) tin?
posted by HearHere at 11:03 AM on June 16 [1 favorite]

More evidence that a lot of the Dark Ages were more obscured than dark.
posted by ocschwar at 1:33 PM on June 16

I remember that in the appendix to Bernard Cornwell's The Warlord Chronicles, he noted that in reviewing old Saxon accounts, there was one warlord who stopped their advances for two generations. The warlord's name is never mentioned by the Saxons and one could suppose that they hated him enough to not even write his name. There were no notations about a sword or a watery tart.
posted by Ber at 3:22 PM on June 16 [1 favorite]

So I slept with two sailors in Tintagel; I didn't sleep with them

I too regret the missed opportunities of my youth.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:04 AM on June 17

Thanks for this. I loved Tintagel when I visited ages ago. It’s on my list to go back to soon!
posted by gemmy at 10:31 AM on June 18