High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Dig is a novel by John Preston, published May 2007, set in the context of the 1939 Anglo-Saxon ship burial excavation at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, England. The novel has been widely reviewed as ‘an account of the excavation at Sutton Hoo in 1939’. The sleevenote advertises it as `a brilliantly realized account of the most famous archaeological dig in Britain in modern times.` However the account in the book differs in various ways from the real events of the Sutton Hoo excavations.