page_title: Taplow Barrow
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Taplow Barrow / History
caption_attribution_description: English: sketch of the Taplow burial
context_page_description: The Taplow Barrow is an early medieval burial mound in Taplow Court, an estate in the south-eastern English county of Buckinghamshire. Constructed in the seventh century, when the region was part of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, it contained the remains of a deceased individual and their grave goods, now mostly in the British Museum. It is often referred to in archaeology as the Taplow burial.
  The Taplow burial was made in what archaeologists call the "conversion period", during which the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were undergoing Christianisation. This period saw the erection of "Final Phase" burials: a select number of inhumations featuring lavish grave goods far richer than the graves of the preceding "migration period". The majority of these Final Phase burials were spatially separate from the new churchyard burials, although the Taplow Burial—which was likely placed next to an early church—is one of the few known exceptions. Located atop a hill, the area around it was previously an Iron Age hillfort and offers widespread views of the local landscape.
  Interred beneath the mound was a single individual—interpreted by archaeologists as a local chieftain—buried with a range of grave goods.
context_section_description: The name Taplow itself is in origin that of the burial mound, from Old English Tæppas hláw "Tæppa's mound", so that the name of the unknown chief or nobleman buried in the mound would seem to have been Tæppa.
  Stevens suggested that it derived from hlæw (mound) and tap or top, meaning "the mound on the crest of the hill".
  During Stevens' investigation, the mound measured 15 feet in eight at its centre, and 240 feet in circumference. He described it as being "somewhat bell-shaped", suggesting that this had been caused by the addition of later inhumation burials around its eastern perimeter.
  The Taplow barrow is located within an earlier Iron Age hillfort. It is positioned on the only hill in the area which offers long-distance views in most directions, which was likely a deliberate decision by its builders. The archaeologist Howard Williams suggested that this prominent landscape location was chosen "to assert claims over land and territory, and express a new identity for the deceased and his kin". In this way, Williams argued, the mound was more than just "a 'marker' for the dead, but something that evoked status, and aspired pasts and futures, and perhaps also the presence of the dead active within the mound." A similar choice of location, overlooking the landscape, was chosen for the roughly contemporary barrow at Asthall, Oxfordshire, which contained an early seventh-century cremation burial.
  Without a fuller excavation of the churchyard having been carried out, the relationship of the mound to other early medieval burials and to the church itself is unclear. Leslie Webster noted that the connection between the church and the mound "raises fundamental questions about the mechanisms of conversion and the assertion of secular power in the conversion period."
caption: Sketch of the burial, made at the 1883 excavation
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