Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain

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It is absolutely astounding what we can find out from graves/burial sites of our forebears about who they were and how they lived. Once the legion left, the place began to fall apart – but a much-diminished population continued to live amongst the ruins, keeping their cattle in the bath-house of the old fortress. I don't think that this book would have been a better book at half the length, but I do think it would have been substantially improved by twice the content.

It sprawled and meandered and said the same thing multiple times, took ten pages or half a chapter to make a point that could have easily been made in a page--or even a few sentences--and I got quite impatient before we reached the end of it. Chapter 6 discusses skeletons found in a ditch at Llanbedrgoch on Anglesey, were they Welsh defenders of the site, captured Viking raiders, or slaves. The remains were discovered in the 1920’s, but Roberts re-examines them telling the story of the probable funerary rites.Even before I'd finished reading Buried I'd started on Alice Roberts' more recent book, Ancestors: review soon. Until quite lately, what archaeologists could learn from a skeleton was often limited to sex, age, cause of death, perhaps an idea of what they looked like in life and what state of health they enjoyed. Further excavations, on the amphitheatre, were carried out in the winter of 1926 into 1927, after the Daily Mail raised funds, with additional financial support coming in from – quite bizarrely – American fans of King Arthur. When historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists of the future look back on our civilisations, they will see reductions in infant mortality, improved longevity - but they will still detect deep inequalities.

The finite span of a human life is what creates its meaning; we have limited time her, and that prompts us to reflect on how best to use this precious time, and what legacies we'd like to leave. The final 70 or so pages are a reiteration of the central ideas of genealogy and migration, which are better utilised during the examples of grave sites. In particular, they can indicate family connections and where someone was brought up, which can often be a very long way indeed from where they were buried. Across millennia, generations of people have flowed through regions and continents like water over rock: the landscapes remain, as do the burials – fixed coordinates amid the flux of time. This is followed by discussion of decapitated burials, starting with an example of seventeen decapitated Roman period burials at Great Whelnetham cemetery, near Bury St Edmunds, which distinguishes between victims of beheadings and post-mortem decapitations.Although writing turns up in a lot of places, those are mostly cities and military settings, and it’s thought that less than 5 per cent of the population of Roman Britain was literate.

Churchyards in the popular imagination seem like obvious, natural places to find graves, but they only start to appear in Britain from the sixth century as part of the culture of Christianity. After some thirty years of military campaigning against the Silurian freedom fighters, the Roman army finally crushed the resistance in southeast Wales. Again there are no definitive answers, just possibilities that may make greater sense given the other material finds at the site. Shortly after those excavations at Caerleon itself, some building work was happening on the southern side of the river, in the village still known at that point as Ultra Pontem (‘Over the Bridge’), turning up more evidence from Roman times. With her easy, relaxed approach, observations and occasional humour she provides interesting and thought provoking insights into the world of ostio-archeology and the new discipline of ancient dna genome sequencing, which is beginning to provide additional - and as always sometimes controversial results regarding early population movements from Europe to the English mainland.Caerleon would become one of three permanent legionary fortresses in Roman-occupied Britain – the other two being Chester and York. But she is frequently repetitive; she is painfully conscious of the sensitivity of these issues, but does also spend a lot of time apologising for each point. I carried a box over to the table, then went to find a couple of large white trays and a pair of forceps. It would perhaps have been better to read it off the page than listen to the audiobook, so that I could have gone back to check things more easily.

The grave goods and the broken remains of five distinctive pottery beakers with a characteristic upside-down bell shape revealed it to be a Beaker burial. They found a large collection of what they believe to be men buried with weapons - they don’t know why. The scale and the detail of the Thousand Ancient Genomes project, which is collaborating with archaeologists across the UK, could transform our understanding of prehistoric Britain, especially as regards mobility and migrations. Think about all the materials and components that constitute them, and all the people who have been involved in making them.Detailed archaeology – trowel work – as well as historical imagination are still essential to understanding the past. It’s an entirely different source of evidence, and should enable us to ask much wider questions about what life was like in the past, and to test the historical interpretations, not to prove them. At the other end of the long room, I pulled a spare table out, applied the brakes to the wheels, and lifted a tall stool down from one of the neat stacks that the students had left them in.