The remains of an elaborate hall have been found in the east of England.
The royal hall is located near the village of Rendlesham in Suffolk, which is about 70 miles northeast of London.
Archaeologists think that the burials of the rulers who lived at Rendlesham between A.D. 570 and 720 are of the same person.
The senior archaeological officer for Suffolk County Council told Live Science that these are the burials of individual kings who would have stayed at Rendlesham over the course of about 150 years.
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She said that the kings don't just live in one place. It's highly probable that the kings of East Anglia would have stayed at Rendlesham.
A skull shows the nose and lips of an Anglo-Saxon teen.
The largest hall in the royal compound is being excavated by Minter. The compound was built on raised land and surrounded by a boundary ditch, and the foundations show it was a timber building.
She said it's likely that there were up to 10 halls in the compound for the king and his retinue of hundreds of people.
The recent excavations at the Rendlesham site are part of the Rendlesham Revealed project, which includes the work of hundreds of volunteers from local communities.
After the start of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain in about A.D. 450, the royal compound at Rendlesham was part of a larger settlement.
A defined area of the royal compound can be found within the larger settlement. The royal residence was put in a settlement that was important to the area.
The place where King Swithelm of the East was christened is recorded in the writings of an English scholar. The conversion of Swithelm's kingdom from paganism to Christianity was done at this time, and Aethelwald's dynasty had been Christian for many years.
Minter said that the royal hall was first identified by aerial photography in 2015, showing cropmarks at the site that indicated the positions of its largest posts. It wasn't excavated until this summer, when archaeological trenches revealed fragments of glass drinking vessels and pottery; dress jewelry; personal items, such as copper pins; an iron knife; and the remains of food preparation and feasts, which indicated that vast quantities of beef and pork had been eaten there
The image is the first of five.
The royal compound at Rendlesham was occupied by the king and his warriors for several months at a time, as long as the food lasted, before they moved on to a different residence elsewhere in the kingdom, according to archaeologists.
Minter thinks it would have been a seasonal event. The population of the settlement would have increased a lot if they had come with a lot of warriors and a big retinue.
There is evidence of mythical islands on a medieval map of Britain.
They could be seen as ruling over the whole kingdom if they had eaten the cupboard bare.
One of the seven main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in Britain was East Anglia. The collapse of Roman rule in Britain led to the founding of them. The invasion of the Saxons, Angles and Jutes from Northern Europe is debated by historians and archaeologists. A study published in the journal Nature analyzed the DNA of nearly 500 people who were buried in England in the 400s and 900s. There was a large migration of people with Northern European ancestry into England according to the results.
The kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons were unified in the ninth century under Alfred the Great, a king of Wessex.
Christopher Scull said in a statement that the latest finds were of "international importance."
"Only at Rendlesham do we have the broader settlement and landscape context of an early English royal center, together with an assortment of metalwork that illuminates the lives and activities of its inhabitants across the social range," he said.
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