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Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain

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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. Silchester is another important administrative capital – which may have come under his control as well. And so we get unending blather that really feels like she got drunk and just rambled on to her bartender about her thoughts and feelings regarding burials in Roman and early Medieval Britain. In this book she takes a long hard look at some historical assumption about the first millennium in Britain, too, in particular the great Anglo-Saxon migration theory.

Roberts discusses funerary and death rites in the Roman, Dark Ages and Anglo-Saxon eras of Britain, using a selection of archaeological finds to lay out history and educated guesses. Their lives were different to ours in so many ways, but there are also moments of striking similarity, when you can suddenly grasp a thread of familiarity and empathy that stretches back through time, and is part of a wider story about what it means, what it feels like, to be human. And then in the seventies of the first century, they were dispatched to south Wales, to sort out the Silures and build their fortress on the Usk.Alice Roberts examines several unusual burials from Roman and medieval times, and uses them to illustrate the diversity and the history of the first millennium AD in Britain. Digging For Britain is a favourite, and Alice always brings knowledge and enthusia

The first historical evidence suggesting a non-haunted British world is expressed in the mid-16th century as Enlightenment began to question the supernatural and evil spirits. 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. We look at the physical traces of their culture, and at the remains of individuals themselves, usually reduced to just their bones and teeth – but with precious DNA locked away inside those hard tissues, and now amenable to analysis. The Romans were essentially invited into southeast Britain, but then they met with opposition from factions not yet amenable to their rule. All this documentary evidence is alluring, and there’s something wonderful about suddenly knowing the names of groups of people and individuals.It is pretty detailed, painstaking stuff, especially when matched against the most contemporary writing available.

Only one other vaguely similar burial had ever been discovered in Britain – a lead coffin in Colchester, with a lead pipe sticking out of it. I would love to think about someone reading this book who has not thought about these things or who hasn't yet taken a strong stance on the subjects in this book. But Caerleon was her own project, and the summary monograph on the amphitheatre, published in 1928, bears just her name.

It’s now possible to analyse the chemical composition of bones and teeth and draw inferences about where a person lived and what their diet was like. There were invasions, and raids, but also a great deal of perfectly peaceful migration, and the different populations overlap both in time and in place more than one might think.

The book was enjoyably chugging along fairly well, with a couple blips of her personal politics and a barely hidden distain of religion, and then that let down at the very end in the Postscript. The 11-metre gap between the inner and outer walls was filled with earth – presumably to create a raised platform for timber seating around the central arena, which was floored in cobbles covered with a deep layer of sand.They’d fought in the Cantabrian Wars as Rome extended its empire into Spain in the first century BCE, and then in Germany, in the early first century CE, after which they were stationed at Argentoratum, now Strasbourg. Roberts discusses these ideas, but doesn’t yet have genomic results to help push the discussion further with empirical data, so that although interesting, this chapter rehashed ideas that I have read about in other recent books about this period. I spent a bit of time choosing a perfect pair for the job, with narrow tips – and not bent out of shape, as so many were in the towers of small crates in the prep room. Chapter 6 discusses skeletons found in a ditch at Llanbedrgoch on Anglesey, were they Welsh defenders of the site, captured Viking raiders, or slaves. Is it a wonder that the buried might later be dug up, staked, bricked, or cremated years later as the period literature describes?

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