The Celts

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Torcs from the Snettisham hoard on display at the British Museum as part of the Celts: Art and Identity exhibition. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

Alice May Roberts FRSB (born 19 May 1973) [2] is an English academic, TV presenter and author. Since 2012 she has been Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham. She was president of the charity Humanists UK between January 2019 and May 2022. [3] She is now a vice president of the organisation. [4] Early life and education [ edit ] Indeed it is far more logical to look at the way language and technologies spread. The advent of Bronze weapons, metal working, ore extraction - all these required skilled people spreading their knowledge. That required language to be taught. It does not necessarily mean invasion and displacement. Indeed there is little evidence for that. This is a detailed and richly imagined account of the deep history of the British landscape, which brings alive those “who have walked here before us”, and speaks powerfully of a sense of connectedness to place that is rooted in common humanity: “we are just the latest human beings to occupy this landscape”.a b Roberts, Alice (2007). Don't Die Young: An Anatomist's Guide to Your Organs and Your Health. Bloomsbury Publishing: London, 2007. ISBN 978-0-7475-9025-5. When they left, their former province seems to have reverted to its pre-invasion patchwork of autonomous tribes who would have had their own identities and who would clearly not have recognised themselves as 'British' (though that's the term almost universally used by historians - including Roberts). There would have been squabbles as local princes or bigwigs fought for control ... creating opportunities for others to exploit ... but we have no records of who they were or what they called themselves.

Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain. Simon & Schuster UK. 2022. ISBN 978-1398510036 The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us. Heron Books. 2014. ISBN 978-1-8486-6477-7. OCLC 910702281.She is a pescatarian, [77] "a confirmed atheist" [78] and former president of Humanists UK, beginning her three-and-a-half-year term in January 2019. [79] [28] She is now a vice president of the organisation. [80] Her children were assigned a faith school due to over-subscription of her local community schools; she campaigns against state-funded religious schools, citing her story as an example of the problems perpetuated by faith schools. [81]

Roberts, Alice (16 September 2016). "Sorry David Attenborough, we didn't evolve from 'aquatic apes' – here's why". The Conversation . Retrieved 16 October 2016. Brief Candle in the Dark – with Richard Dawkins. 21 January 2016. Archived from the original on 19 December 2021 . Retrieved 21 January 2016. I'm a vegetarian, who eats fish (29:50) She presented the series Origins of Us, which aired on BBC Two in October 2011, examining how the human body has adapted through seven million years of evolution. [43] The last part of this series featured Roberts visiting the Rift Valley in East Africa. So we have to distinguish between the Britannians - those people who lived under Roman rule; the 'British' - a global term used by contemporary historians to describe anyone living in what is now the UK, but probably not the Irish; and 'Britons' - predominently Welsh, but certainly indigenous people resisting the Anglo-Saxon invaders. 'Celtic' is not the only problematic term, Roberts, however, has no problem using 'British', etc.

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Copson, Andrew; Roberts, Alice (2020). The Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning and joy. Little, Brown Book Group. ISBN 978-0349425467. This book surveys evidence from all over Europe, eventually coming to the conclusion that Celticness might have originated in the West and spread east, rather than the other way round. It also pours cold water on the idea of human sacrifices (though it doesn’t mention some of the archaeological evidence about Boudicca’s revolt and the claims of human sacrifice and barbaric practices around that), with what I think seems like justified scepticism. Roberts points out that we’ve got a fundamental problem where the literature is interpreted in ways which prop up the interpretation of archaeological finds, at the same time as those archaeological finds are held up as truth in interpreting the literature.