[1] Prior to the 20th century, the site was a part of a large area of acid Sandlings Heathland which stretched from Snape all the way to Aldeburgh and which was used primarily for sheep grazing.

[1][2] The acidic soils in the area would have prevented the growth of most species of native British trees, and therefore it is probable that prior to the plantation of predominantly pine woodland in the vicinity of the cemetery during the 20th century, both the River Alde and the sea would have been visible from the mounds, as would the town of Iken.

[3] According to the monk Bede, writing in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum in the 8th century, the Anglo-Saxon age began when three tribal groups from Northern Germany and Southern Denmark – the Saxons, Angles and Jutes – began to migrate into Britain, where they were initially employed as mercenaries by the indigenous Romano-British population following the collapse of Roman Imperial rule.

[4] It is likely that the new settlers did not adhere strictly to their old tribal and ethnic ties, with new syncretic blends developing and new identities forged as they mixed with one another and with the indigenous British population.

There is evidence that these colonists maintained ties with the Germanic-language cultures of Scandinavia, Germany and Northern France; they certainly traded with these societies for luxury goods, and told epic stories such as Beowulf which were set in their ancestral lands.

[5] The Snape cemetery lies within land that comprised a part of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of East Anglia, which according to Bede had been settled by the Angle tribe.

[6] Unlike at the Anglo-Saxon cemetery of Spong Hill in Norfolk, at Snape, these cremations and inhumations were not spatially divided, with both rites being completely intermixed and largely contemporary with one another.

Nevertheless, several grave goods had remained, and were discovered by Davidson and his excavators; these included two iron spearheads, suggesting that the burial might have been male, the gold Snape Ring and a glass claw beaker.

[8] Another find from the burial was initially described as a "mass of human hair... wrapped in a cloth of some kind", although later archaeologists reinterpreted this as a form of shaggy cloak akin to those found at Sutton Hoo and Broomfield.

[10] The best known artefact from the Anglo-Saxon burial is the Snape ring, which consists of a Roman onyx gemstone engraved with the figure of Bonus Eventus which has been set in a large hoop.

[11] Filmer-Sankey disputed Rupert Bruce-Mitford's analysis, arguing instead that the Snape Ring had been created in continental Europe, probably by Frankish craftsmen in the early-mid 6th century.

Supporting this idea, he noted that it had close parallels in both form and decoration to Frankish jewelry of this date and that Germanic settings of Roman intaglios are common on the continent but otherwise unknown from Anglo-Saxon England.

A city solicitor and former legal adviser to the government of the Ottoman Empire, he had no training in excavation, but was curious as to the historic mounds that lay on his land.

[14][13] Although none of them had any training in excavation, they did so in a meticulous manner, starting with a pit in the centre of each mound and then digging outwards, all the time recording the position of artefacts, such as the ship rivets, in situ.

[15] Enthused by the success of the dig, he decided to return to excavate at the cemetery the following year, putting in a trench twelve yards long which unearthed over forty vases and a few other finds.

[17] The importance of Snape cemetery within Anglo-Saxon archaeology had been eclipsed by the 1939 excavation of the ship burial under Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo under the directorship of Basil Brown (1888–1977).

[20][21] In 1972, a sewer trench was being dug along the northern side of the road, and after a local resident alerted Ipswich Museum it was agreed that archaeologists would observe the construction.

Over the following three years, the resistivity survey was extended to cover 13,000 m2 of the area, first under the leadership of Dockrill and then of Dr Roger Walker of Geoscan Research.

[18] Renewed archaeological interest in the Snape site came about following the 1983 commencement of new excavations at Sutton Hoo under the directorship of Martin Carver of the University of York.

[20] In 1992, Filmer-Sankey published an overview of the excavations that had taken place up to that date as an academic paper in Martin Carver's edited anthology, The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in North-Western Europe.