Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials

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Studies of DNA from other Beaker graves in Germany show ancestry from the Eurasian steppe and migration clearly played a major role in establishing Beaker culture. In 2002, not far from Amesbury in southern Wiltshire and a mile or so from Stonehenge, archaeologists were investigating the site of a new school when they discovered something remarkable. But in Ancestors , pre-eminent archaeologist, broadcaster and academic Professor Alice Roberts explores what we can learn about the very earliest Britons, from burial sites and by using new technology to analyse ancient DNA.

Together with two stone wrist guards, or bracers, they formed the largest collection of bronze age archery equipment ever found.

As an aside, not in her book, I note that social gender categories often follow linguistic gender categories. Can you imagine an existence of years of puss seeping abscessed teeth slowly rotting through your mandible? Linguistic gender is the way that words are tied together by categorising the things they represent, thus nouns are tied to pronouns by gender, and both are tied to adjectives in many European languages. In the 20th Century, society was largely defined by a division into male and female, and property ownership was the key to social class. But, would the pre-archaeology topic have piqued public interest for a hundred years to advance the study to modern standards?

Indeed the grave itself contained nearly a hundred items – including copper knives, gold objects, boars’ tusks and a shale ring – making it the most richly furnished grave from the period that had ever been discovered in Britain. The reality of multiple, miserable, slow-death diseases is in the bones simply had to direct the trajectory of civilization. The blending of hunter gatherers with farmers was troubling, at least in some regions where evidence exists. e 1-star, the author's atheist/ anti-church droning and never missing an opportunity to inject wokeness. Roberts is the new Da Vinci, able to shift between science and humanities, the objective and subjective, the global and the individual.The Amesbury Archer is preserved in Salisbury Museum and, according to Roberts, “our visits to museums, to gaze on such human remains, are a form of ancestor worship”. The moment I lifted the bowl out of the grave, my hands earthy from digging; the moment the potter (the mourner, the parent? It explores our interconnected global ancestry, and the human experience that binds us all together. For example, one chapter revolves around the ways in which the presence of Stonehenge has distorted our theories about the surrounding landscape -- every settlement turns into "where the builders of Stonehenge lived"; even Mesolithic remains are evaluated in the context of their proximity to Stonehenge!

But their positioning suggested they had been cast into the grave after the body had been laid in the wood-lined chamber.

In her book, Roberts takes seven different prehistoric burials and explores who they may have been and what they reveal about their communities. Detailed archaeology – trowel work – as well as historical imagination are still essential to understanding the past.