The new reconstruction of what was met with universal acclaim in November 1971?
The first major success for Williams came during the re-excavation of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial from 1965–1970. In 1966 he was appointed the conservator of the Sutton Hoo finds, and in the summer of 1967 he helped with the moulding of the ship impression. The following summer the casts were reassembled in a warehouse and a fibreglass replica made. The process was more dangerous than was then known, and left Williams allergic to styrene for the rest of his life.In 1968, as the re-excavation at Sutton Hoo reached its conclusion and with problems apparent in the reconstructions of several of the finds, Williams was put in charge of a team tasked with their continued conservation. In this capacity he conserved many of the objects, chiefly among them the helmet, shield, drinking horns, maplewood bottles, tubs, and buckets. Williams's colleagues at the museum termed the Sutton Hoo helmet his "pièce de résistance"; the iconic artefact from England's most famous archaeological discovery, it had previously been restored in 1945–1946 by Herbert Maryon. Williams took this reconstruction to pieces, and from 1970 to 1971 he spent eighteen months of time and a full year of work rearranging the more than 500 fragments. No photographs of the fragments in situ had been taken during the original excavation in 1939, nor were their relative positions recorded. As Rupert Bruce-Mitford, who oversaw the work, put it, the task for Williams "was thus reduced to a jigsaw puzzle without any sort of picture on the lid of the box", and, "as it proved, a great many of the pieces missing": fitting for Williams, who did jigsaw puzzles to relax. Unveiled on 2 November 1971, the new reconstruction was met with universal acclaim. It was published the following year by Bruce-Mitford, and posthumously by Williams in 1992.
Sutton Hoo helmet