Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain

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Yeah. I mean, I guess we probably won't be seeing a return to carving cups out of each other's skulls, or I hope not. But that's a really fascinating point about our current burial practices. I sort of wondered what you think that archaeologists of the future might be able to learn from studying our remains and the way that we commemorate the dead?

It's really difficult to say, I mean, I suppose if you look at it from a broadly societal level, you'd say, well, they're not incompatible, because there's plenty of scientists that are religious, there are I mean, you know, if you look at scientists as a whole, we are less religious than the rest of the population. But from an individual perspective, there are obviously lots and lots of scientists doing absolutely brilliant work, very eminent scientists who are religious. So it's not incompatible on that kind of individual level for them. And you know, somehow, they are able to return to look at their religion in one way, or look at their science in one way. And the two are not in tension with each other in their minds. Interestingly, people only started to be buried in churchyards from the sixth century CE - again, a consequence of the development of Christian doctrine. Prior to that, almost all burials took place outside settlements. Let’s return to that Red Lady skeleton. Just by looking at the carefully preserved bones (which she lays out in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History), Alice can see from the left pelvic bone that – far from being a witch – this was an adult male. Mind-bogglingly, radio-carbon dating carried out in 2006 indicated he lived 34,000 years ago, well before the peak of the last Ice Age. In other words, his is the earliest burial found anywhere in Britain. She gets down to some juicy evidence as well. Gnawed human bones made by human teeth and cutmarks indicating cannibalism in the caves at Cheddar Gorge. Did our Neanderthal friends bury their dead? Are the Beaker people invaders? Chariot burials during Iron Age times. Intriguing stuff.In Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain, Dr. Alice Roberts (of Digging for Britain on the BBC), postulates that perhaps we have it all wrong about the Anglo-Saxon invasion and the term "Anglo-Saxon" as it's applied in Britain. The archaeological evidence just doesn't support these older theories in many cases. The written evidence that we have comes a few hundred years after the events described by the likes of Bede in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, who tells us the names of kings with suspiciously British names (Cerdic and Cynric, for example), who supposedly had Germanic roots. The archaeological evidence (burial practices and grave goods) suggest not only that older, native British burial rites were wide-spread, but that grave goods suggest a far closer connection to more northern regions of Europe. And then when we're looking for solutions in a similar way, to do that as objectively as possible and to strip away ideology. And I feel in the UK that we've particularly been very ideology-driven. This “following the science thing is not true at all, we've been following an ideology, and trying to shoehorn the science into that. There's always kind of worries about what's going to happen to science in a time of crisis, that we're depending on it so much. And that if there is, if there's any kind of nuance, or uncertainty around various facts and figures, then, you know, the public might feel uneasy about that, or anxious about that. And I think that's, I don't think that's the reason to pretend that the evidence is either more robust or more certain than we know it to be. I think the absolute fundamental point is that we need to maintain trust, and that we need to, we need scientists who are engaging with the public in a very level way. The mention of 'foreigners' is deliberate: Roberts is interested in the narratives of waves of invasion in the post-Roman period -- 'Gildas, Bede and then the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle present this picture of a Roman, Christian culture destroyed by pagan, Saxon culture' -- and argues that it's more likely to have been peaceful migration, or at least assimilation of raiders. And she's keen to emphasise that there have always been migrants, and always been people whose families have lived in the same place for a long time, and that these two groups have intermixed over the centuries. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's something really fascinating about these sort of legends that we grow up with, and the points of crossover between legend and history, and maybe not all is, as we think it is.

Roberts presents evidence both for and against this theory, in a very readable way for even the reader who has no previous knowledge of British history from the Iron Age to 1066. And then one of the really exciting developments at the moment is that you don't even need a bone to get DNA out of. You can get DNA out of mud. So we're seeing amazing breakthroughs with sedaDNA, sedimentary ancient DNA, where just using soil samples, for instance, you can extract DNA from that. And you can see which organisms were around in a particular environment – sort of dizzying, the amount of information. It takes Ancestors a while to warm up, but when it does, it is really fabulous. Roberts takes us through the detailed archaeology/anthropology of burials in Britain, exploring what we know and what we guess about what this means. You know,’ Alice Roberts says, ‘we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of years of human history – all around the world… What we really see, when we start looking properly, is the incredible diversity of those cultures, through time and through space.’ There is also a long second chapter about the “Red Lady” excavated at Paviland Cave, which I had read about at least twice before, but it is the major early burial, so Roberts probably had no choice but to discuss this burial.Buried by Alice Roberts was just brilliant and captivating. A carefully produced book. Buried is a renewal of ancient burials, weaving together stories of the dead. Romans, Vikings, Children🏺 Prof. Roberts maintains a firm hold at all times over what is often highly disputed results and conclusions - and offers her own thoughts regarding the often misused and misunderstood term of what we mean by ' Anglo - Saxon ' This book was *exactly* what I was looking for: an engaging archaeological history of Britain, with particular focus on skeletons/burials from the Paleo, Meso, and Neolithic. Delighted to find such an on-point book to nourish my anthropology fascination.