Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain

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The potential for huge advances in understanding is there – but it’s also important not to rush to conclusions or to be seduced by sensational headlines about breakthroughs. For example: in the chapter on Vikings, Roberts takes five pages to meander through some thoughts she's had about linguistic similarities between English and Scandinavian languages that strike her as too extreme to be explained by Viking raids.

Looking at the first millennium of the Common Era, burial archaeology can provide us with precious glimpses of individuals, their culture and beliefs. Roberts repetitive weakness (IMHO) is extrapolating a Roman/Dark Age/Medieval cultural interpretation from burial and anatomical evidence by applying a 21st-century Humanist worldview. The remains were discovered in the 1920’s, but Roberts re-examines them telling the story of the probable funerary rites. 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. A favorite remark of my esteemed mother is that a book would have been a better book at half the length.Also the name of the Greek historian Pausanias is spelled incorrectly both in the text and the index (though this could be an editing issue). 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. Some have interpreted this simply as a version of regnum, ‘kingdom’ – a kingdom existing with Roman support, part of the Imperial system. 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.

But brooches were not just decorative; they had the function, before buttons were invented, of fastening both dresses and cloaks. He sent four legions, supported by an equivalent number of auxiliaries – some forty thousand soldiers in all. Funerary ritual and burial itself represent attempts to understand mortality, to make sense of loss, to fix the departed in memory, and to tie them – and us – to a landscape. There’s a wonderful sepia-tinted photograph of the excavation team: twenty-three men, one small boy and – in the centre, holding a book – one woman. 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.Chop the five pages of personal speculation, or at least interweave the personal observations in the context of telling us what linguists and actual specialists know about the history of Norse-English language contact! Burial customs, how a body lies in a grave and what is put in with it, can indeed tell us a lot, but there is a tendency to interpret what one sees in the light of what one expected to find. On an individual basis, an ancient genome can provide information about the sex of a person, and even provide clues to appearance. But their positioning suggested they had been cast into the grave after the body had been laid in the wood-lined chamber.