A Conversion-Period Burial in an Ancient Landscape: A high-status female grave near the Rollright Stones

In 2015, a metal detector user uncovered several early medieval artefacts from land adjacent to a major prehistoric complex that straddles the Oxfordshire - Warwickshire border known as the Rollright Stones. He alerted the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the well-preserved burial of a female, aged around 25-35 years and aligned S-N, was subsequently excavated. The grave contained a number of remarkable objects on the basis of which the burial can be dated fairly securely to the seventh century. It lay some 50m northeast of a standing stone presumed to be prehistoric in date, known locally as the ‘King Stone’. This burial and its remarkable setting form a significant addition to the corpus of well furnished female burials which are shedding new light on the role of women in Conversion-period England