You’ve always said your work isn’t about the past or even the present. One of the great reckonings in the film comes when Basil’s wife, May (Monica Dolan), urges her disaffected husband to return to the dig. When Edith’s rocket-obsessed son Robert (Archie Barnes) compares Vikings to “space pilots” because they both “explore new lands”, we see the film drawing uncritically on a historical tropes of expansionism - despite the fact the violence of colonialism and occupation is well understood today. Larry Horricks/NetflixĪnglo-Saxonism was vital to underwriting white racial supremacy as a mandate for Britain’s imperial power and the expansionist concept of Manifest Destiny, based on the belief that the British and white settlers in the colonies inherited a drive for expansion from their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The excavation revealed the imprint of a decayed 27m long ship, with a burial chamber full of riches. Why the idea that the English have a common Anglo-Saxon origin is a mythīy the 19th century, historians, educators, and politicians used the “ Anglo-Saxon period” to loosely refer to the period spanning from the first settlement of these Northern Europeans in the 5th century to the Norman conquest in the mid-11th century. While they were historical people, their identity has been subject to nationalistic and romanticised constructions. The Dig reanimates key tropes from the persistent 19th century British and American ideology of Anglo-Saxonism.Īfter the end of Roman rule, Britain was the destination for groups of Germanic migrants who later became known as the Anglo-Saxons. The film’s depiction of Basil is deeply attractive, but in the current political climate it warrants closer scrutiny. He makes discoveries due to his intimate acquaintance with the Suffolk soil, knowledge bequeathed from his farming father and grandfather. Andy Rain/EPAīasil, an in-demand but underpaid jobbing excavator, values his nose ahead of his eyes or hands: “the past speaks” to him not through book knowledge but through the soil. The Sutton Hoo helmet is one of only four complete Anglo-Saxon helmets to survive.
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