The Dig is a historical novel by John Preston, published in May 2007, set in the context of the 1939 Anglo-Saxon ship burial excavation at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, England.

The dust jacket describes it as "a brilliantly realized account of the most famous archaeological dig in Britain in modern times".

The author employs a degree of literary license so that the account in the book differs in various ways from the real events of the Sutton Hoo excavations.

[2] However, by his own account Preston only became aware of the story surrounding the excavation around 2004, and therefore the content is not derived directly from Mrs. Piggott's testimony.

An earlier account of the controversy and personalities surrounding the discovery, drawing on unpublished letters and Ipswich Museum MS documentation, was published by Robert Markham in 2002.

The most obvious example is that the Suffolk excavators found and researched the iron ship-rivets from Mound 2 in 1938[11] and were therefore ready to recognise them as soon as they appeared in the following year.

[15] Also, some descriptions of the removal of artefacts in the chamber do not tally with the evidence of photographs taken during the excavations: the whetstone was half upright, and was left semi-exposed for some time, not as described on pages 163–5: and the purse lid was carefully cleaned down among the other gold items in the surrounding assemblage, and their relationships elucidated by the Piggotts, not "prised out" as described on pages 150–51.

[2] In the novel, Peggy tells how the English cellist Beatrice Harrison was recorded and broadcast during the 1920s and 1930s playing in her garden to the accompaniment of nightingales singing (pp.

Her account appears to be in homage to the poem "The Nightingale Broadcasts" by Robert Saxton, which won the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry in 2001.

Harrison appeared in the 1943 British film The Demi-Paradise, as herself, playing while nightingales sing during a BBC radio broadcast.

A film adaptation was in production in 2019, directed by Simon Stone, with a screenplay by Moira Buffini, and starring Carey Mulligan as Edith Pretty, Ralph Fiennes as Basil Brown, and Lily James as Peggy Piggott,[18][19] to be distributed by Netflix.