Mick Aston's summary

(As spoken to the Time Team Live phoneline at the end of the third day of the dig)

Hello there, this is Mick Aston. I have just finished filming on the Saxon cemetery site near the New Forest and it's really been the most extraordinary excavation. We found the most amazing collection of stuff. I don't think we expected to find so many buckets – they are really drinking vessels – from the Anglo-Saxon period, and so many spear heads and shields and shield bosses and so on.

There are many Anglo-Saxon cemeteries across the country, probably 1,000 or more of them. Many of them were excavated in the 19th century and a number of them have been dug more recently but not in a great deal of detail. So this is quite an important excavation with lots of new information, and I suppose the most significant feature that has come out of it altogether is this extraordinary complex on the top of the mound on top of the little hill here, which we now think is really a rather special group of burials.

The original Byzantine bucket, which had come all the way from the east Mediterranean, seems to have formed the focus for this, with a couple of skeletons laid out either side of it. Both of these have spears and shields and around them are grouped other buckets and indeed other grave goods. And the post holes that puzzled us so much a little while ago now seem to add up to some sort of timber burial chamber, a timber building or structure over these burials, acting as a sort of mausoleum.

Andrew Reynolds, one of our experts, has seen this sort of thing before – he said clearly this is what it is – but it's very well preserved and very well laid out. So I think we should see this properly as the focus of the whole series of other burials around, many of them in pairs. Indeed Helen Geake, another one of our experts, said we have a very large percentage of double burials, many of them with grave goods, most of them with spears – which is rather unusual – and forming a focus on this hill.

We can see now that it was in use for only a very brief period centred round about 500 AD – some hundred years after the end of the Roman period in Britain, and indeed more than a hundred years before the conversion to Christianity. For some reason this cemetery did not continue in use, it didn't develop, and presumably the people who live around here buried their dead elsewhere before they became Christians and before they properly built the parish church in the village.

We think we know where the people lived who used this cemetery, because we have a scatter of pottery found in the fieldwalking. This is a quarter mile or so away. So we've learnt an enormous amount about it, and the course of the research into the objects and the study of the bones and the burials will go on for quite some time.

It's worth remembering that this excavation actually took place because of the finding of the bronze bucket by Steve Bolger, a metal detectorist. Rather than keeping it to himself or selling it on the open market, he took it to the Portable Antiquities Officer for the area, Sally Worrell, who then proceeded to deal with it in the proper way. This is a very responsible way of dealing with finds and it is sad to say this doesn't always happen. Often material is stolen from sites, disappears and the archaeological knowledge goes with it.

So if you are somebody who uses metal detectors and finds it an interesting and enjoyable hobby, then clearly the lesson is to work with an archaeologist and report your finds. As you can see from this particular exercise, an enormous amount of information can be gained in addition to the metal objects themselves.