Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain

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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.

Sitting at the intersection of art, science, and history, this week’s podcast reveals fresh perspectives and fascinating insights into our material world. Indeed many bodies, and pictorial representations, seem to show people (women especially) with a “hybrid identity”, wearing aspects of both Roman and North European dress and jewellery, presumably depending on what was in fashion at the time. All this documentary evidence is alluring, and there’s something wonderful about suddenly knowing the names of groups of people and individuals. However I noticed modern political and social opinions and attitudes creep into the work and writing.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. At least in this ebook edition, the many photos of artifacts and digs are at the end of the book (along with an extensive reference list), although there are some drawings within the text. Especially towards the end (but elsewhere) she is insightful on emerging thinking on how "the English" created themselves. 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. Although not a central topic of this book, she traces how the adoption of Christianity as an organised religion shaped the way our ancestors lived and died, and how our ancestors shaped Christianity to meet their own aspirations and political ends, when the Anglo-Saxons, like the Romans before them, began to realise the exceptional potential of institutionalised religion.

For certain people, in certain areas of Roman Britannia, at particular times, it may have felt like living under an oppressive regime enforced by a military occupation. Most of the classical authors who wrote about Roman Britain didn’t even live here, such as the senators Tacitus and Dio Cassius. Always fascinating, Professor Alice Roberts is fast becoming a national treasure and this, like all her books, is insightful and well worth reading. After dealing with an insurgency in Gaul, they became one of the four legions involved in the invasion of Britain in 43 CE.

This could be seen as a direct sequel to 'Ancestors' - it picks up, time-wise, where Ancestors left off, taking us from the prehistoric and iron age burials that were the focus of that into the romano-british landscape and into the early middle ages.