Sutton Hoo, not a boat but the trace of a boat, down to its nails and the grain of its wood. Not a shipwreck but a burial - but perhaps the difference doesn’t hold - the same thing, a fossil, resting just below the surface of the earth for 1300 years. A boat with treasure, such beautiful things, but one resting on older sites of bronze age and neolithic peoples, each marking the land in their own intentional and unintentional ways. There can be no such thing as a pristine resting place for a wreck - not the bottom of the sea, not the reef, not the land. The wreck brings a new combination of people and things into a loose alliance and then breaks it apart. One of those things carried by the boat builders of Sutton Hoo into their wreck grave is bitumen all the way from the tar fountain of Cheshmeh Qir Dehloran in modern day Iran.