It is directed by Simon Stone with a distinctly British tone of restraint worthy of film producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, who made the 1990s hits Howards End and The Remains of the Day. The Dig, based on the novel of the same name by John Preston, rights that wrong. Being an independent scholar without an academic post was an irregularity that led to the omission of his name at the British Museum’s display of the Sutton Hoo treasures for decades. He was a self-educated archaeologist and astronomer, who spent much of his income as a tenant farmer and insurance agent on that education.

However, it was very nearly missed – and Brown wasn’t always acknowledged for his efforts. It is now considered one of the most important finds in Britain, the majesty of its 27-metre burial ship and 7th-century Anglo-Saxon treasures reframing historians’ view of the so-called Dark Ages. She along with Basil Brown played by actor Ralph Fiennes who worked on the excavation of The Great Ship Burial and his assistants Bert Fuller and Tom Sawyer along with the Ipswich museum joined forces and started excavating Edith’s estate.BASIL BROWN, played in The Dig by Ralph Fiennes, was the principal archaeologist behind the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England. Frank and Edith Pretty's son Robert was born in 1930.įrank Pretty died due to stomach cancer when Edith Pretty's son Robert was just 4 years old. When Edith Pretty’s son Robert Pretty got a bit older she asked for help from the Ipswich museum to tell her what was on her estate. In July 1937, Edith met Vincent Redstone, a local historian, and spoke about burial mounds on her estate, which she became increasingly curious about. Edith and Frank finally married a year after her father passed away in 1925. He proposed to Edith on her eighteenth birthday, but she had to decline because her father disapproved of their relationship. Her husband, Frank Pretty, knew her for many years before they got married. According to the British Museum, Edith Pretty was born in 1883 came from a wealthy family and inherited the Sutton Hoo estate.

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