Bronze Age coffin with remains of man found on England golf course

LONDON • In July 2018, Dr Hugh Willmott was overseeing the excavation of an Anglo-Saxon burial site in north-east England when a regional preservation official told him about a potentially more exciting find.

Just down the road, at Tetney Golf Club, a Grimsby golf course, workers digging in a small pond with a giant excavator had hit something extremely unexpected: a prehistoric coffin containing the skeletal remains of a man.

When Dr Willmott, an archaeologist and senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield, arrived at the golf course the next day, he found a scene that he said could only be described as "a mess".

About 3.5m underground, the crew had discovered a waterlogged burial site and an exposed coffin broken in pieces. Dr Willmott said he quickly realised that he and his team of archaeologists would have to act fast and undertake a "rescue and recovery operation" to save the coffin from further deterioration.

Archaeologists inspected the timbers and discovered it was a log coffin made of a hollowed-out tree that had been buried under a mound. Using log coffins was "an unusual form of burial" that had briefly been the practice 4,000 years ago in the Bronze Age, said Dr Tim Allen, an archaeologist with Historic England, a public agency charged with preserving the country's history. Along with the remains was "a perfectly preserved axe" with a stone head and a wooden handle, according to the University of Sheffield.

The ancient timber and axe were placed in temporary cold storage to keep them stable while archaeologists tried to learn as much as possible about them before the researchers had to begin the conservation process. The coffin and the axe will eventually be displayed at The Collection, an art and archaeology museum in Lincolnshire, not far from the golf course.

NYTIMES