The film had a limited release in theatres on January 15th, 2021, followed by Netflix fourteen days later. Although based on the 2007 novel of the same name by John Preston, it tells the Real Life story of the excavation of an Anglo-Saxon ship buried in Sutton Hoo, Suffolk in 1939 on the eve of World War II. The Dig is a 2021 British historical drama film starring Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes and Lily James. If you want to be the first to receive the latest news from Malta, download the Newsbook APP here.

This eventually became the still to-go-to reference book on Maltese prehistoric monuments, ‘The Prehistoric Antiquities of the Maltese Islands’ by J.D Evans (1971). Some of the books by Stuart Piggott found-at the NMA reference-library | Photo credit: National Museum of Archaeology, MaltaĪccording to the NMA, Piggott was to leave a more significant mark on Maltese archaeology as one of the external experts on the commission supervising the defining study, Malta Ancient Monuments Survey which recorded Malta’s prehistoric monuments, excavations and objects found there.

One of the characters in the film The Dig (which is based on the true story of the Sutton Hoo excavation) currently streaming on Netflix, is archaeologist Stuart Piggott, played by actor Ben Chaplin.īut what connection did the real-life Piggott have with Malta?Ī very interesting post on the National Museum of Archaeology (NMA), Malta’s Facebook Page speaks of a short stop by Piggott and scientist and archaeologist Glyn Daniel in Malta in 1943, en route from Cairo to Algiers, where the two “spent two ‘blissful’ days inspecting megalithic monuments and rock-cut tombs on the island, several spattered with bits of German and Italian aircraft” (Source: Roger Mercer, British Academy 1998).

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