2022/144: Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain — Alice Roberts

The idea of British culture (and the British population) being enriched by all these civilising influences – bringing farming, metalworking, Roman civilisation and the rest – is a colonialist construction: the incomers are a Good Thing. But this origin myth – the idea of civilising influences spreading from the east – is balanced against another in which indigenous culture evolves, with a home-grown hero like Boudica pitted against a tyrannical regime.[loc. 3670]

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. As she writes, these are 'the traces of ordinary lives, and people whose stories were never written down': there's a fair amount of speculation here in these very human stories, like the man buried with a pipe poking out of the earth above the grave, which may have its roots in Greek Orthodox tradition: wine, or blood, may have been poured down the pipe as a way of including the deceased in a graveside feast. (Apparently this custom was also practiced in Soviet Russia.)

Roberts explains, clearly and without jargon, the intricacies of determining gender and biological sex from burials, and how it's important not to project modern cultural concepts onto the dead. Early archaeologists had a tendency to assign sex and gender based on grave goods (brooches for women, swords for men) but osteoarchaeology shows that there isn't a definite correlation between the biological sex of a skeleton -- where it can be determined: the majority can't -- and the goods in their grave. Roberts mentions a number of theories: heirloom jewellery in a man's grave; jewellery worn by men and women alike; individuals biologically male living as female, and vice versa.

Some of the burials discussed here are poignant, such as the remains of a very young child (perhaps a late foetus) which had been dismembered, most likely during obstetric surgery. There are lethal acts of violence, too, with little care being taken over the interment of the bodies: decapitated corpses, possibly victims of 'headhunting' or of superstitions about the walking dead, and a group of 'foreigners' found in a ditch in Anglesey, their bones revealing that they came from as far away as Scandinavia, to be executed with considerable violence.

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.

Highly readable, with clear explanations of the cutting-edge science of archaeogenetics, and a pleasing balance between the raw data of archaeology and its human context. Even before I'd finished reading Buried I'd started on Alice Roberts' more recent book, Ancestors: review soon.