The latest trove unearthed at a dig on England's Salisbury Plain was a 6th-Century Saxon warrior. Fittingly, it was soldiers who found the grave.

The skeleton was largely intact. Also in the grave were what are assumed to be the man's possessions: a sword, a spear, a knife, and an upscale belt buckle. The spear was found at the man's side, the sword in his grip. Attached to the intact sword were traces of the scabbard.

Doing the digging were veterans of the Afghan war, part of Operation Nightingale, a program designed to aid in their recovery from recent wars, Afghanistan among them. The Wessex Archaeology-backed program has employed several veterans who have retrained as archaeologists.

The soldiers found the grave underneath a military road normally used by tanks and other large military vehicles. It was the last day of a scheduled three-week dig for the current group. The dig has also turned up several more burials from Saxon times, of men and women and children and of their burial goods, including weapons and jewelry.

The dig was at the well-known Barrow Clump burial mound, which dates to Neolithic times. Bronze Age peoples and the Anglo-Saxons used the area as a cemetery.