Street House
About
Initially identified during the 2005 excavation of an Iron Age settlement, Street House excavations slowly revealed a large Anglo-Saxon cemetery over three years, 2005 - 2007. This site revealed many important finds and contributed significantly to the understanding of the Anglo-Saxon world during the conversion period between c AD 650 and c AD 750.
The discovery of the royal cemetery at Street House has given us a unique insight into Anglo-Saxon burial and ceremonial practices during the 7th century AD. The square orientation of the site is unique within 7th-century AD England, while the presence of the buildings, the timber grave markers, the burial mounds, and the creation of structures within the graves suggest well-ordered burial rites for this community. The wealth of finds, the gold, jewels, silver and beads, also suggest long-distance and powerful connections between this community and others, and further reinforce the belief that this site is that of a royal Anglo-Saxon cemetery.
We invite you to explore some of these finds.
Site plan, Street House.
Artist’s reconstruction of the Sunken feature building at Street House.
Sunken feature building excavated at street house in 2006.
Knives
Jewellrey
Miscellaneous
Anglo Saxon Clothing
Communities in the Tees Valley had a much greater range of clothing styles. Compared to southern Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, communities in the North were influenced by surviving Romano-British technologies and cultural exchanges with Celts and Scandinavians. Variety was also introduced at a local level as production techniques were shared by women within and moving beyond their home villages through marriage or migration.
As found today, clothing in the Anglo-Saxon period could be functional, decorative and symbolic. Metalwork was especially important in terms of function and form. Accessories like brooches that fastened on to cloaks and wrist clasps that closed dress sleeves functioned like modern buttons and zippers. Some accessories were probably expressions of the owner’s age, culture, status, gender and individuality. Items made from precious metals were, like today, status symbols. Ornate jewellery such as silver and gold bracelets or amulets were expressions of individual or familial wealth and craftsmanship.
Anglo-Saxon clothing also followed fashion trends. For example, in the early Anglo-Saxon period women wore tubular gowns, or peplos, fastened with a brooch on either shoulder in a style first found in classical Greece, and which was worn across Iron Age Europe and Asia. The migration of people from the European Continent further influenced clothing styles, with wealth carried in the form of accessories, such as necklaces comprising up to a hundred amber and blue glass beads (compare “Anglo-Saxons in the Tees Valley” with “Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Street House”) belt buckles and brooches made of precious metals like gold and silver, or other practical objects like hide shields or iron swords and seaxes.
Below: One Anglo-Saxon woman dining with two Anglo-Saxon men. Reenactment.
Anglo-Saxon woman and baby, illustration.
