The dead give up their secrets in a brilliant history of Britain
In 2018, archaeologists digging in the sandy yellow soil of a building site near Bury St Edmunds came across the skeleton of a child. The set of bones was almost complete. It dated to the 5th century AD, around the time that Britain was cut off from the collapsing western Roman Empire. And it belonged to an infant, who had died around the age of three or four. That in itself was not especially unusual. What was strange was that the skeleton had been beheaded and its head was placed between its legs.
Typically, when Roman-era Britons buried their dead, they were laid on their backs in one piece. But here normal practice had been abandoned. The child died, its head was removed and on burial the skull was deliberately misplaced. And it was not the only one. The archaeologists found the remains of 16 other decapitees, along with other skeletons found resting in weird positions: hunched, flexed or face down. Some showed signs of maltreatment in life – others had toiled until their bones were shiny with osteoarthritis. The question was, what had happened to these people? And what did the manner of their burials say about life and death in Britain at the dawn of the Middle Ages?
Alice Roberts – a professor at Birmingham University, best known for her BBC archaeology programmes such as Digging For Britain – has a hunch. Having examined one of the Bury St Edmunds skeletons, she argues that the site may have been a slave cemetery, in which were buried the remains of harshly treated slaves. Signs of branding and beatings on many of the skeletons suggested forced labour, as did a manacle unearthed nearby. The decapitations, Roberts suggests, could be the sign of a slave owner’s guilty conscience. In other contexts from around the same time, corpses have been mutilated to stop the angry dead from arising and haunting those who tormented them in life.
Of course, all this comes with a standard caveat: “I’m not sure we’ll ever know.” But anyone who goes into archaeology looking for certainty is on a hiding to nothing. The best operators combine a forensic eye with a colourful imagination and the honesty to admit where the line lies between knowledge and speculation. And Roberts is one of the best working today.
Unsurprisingly, Buried is written like a TV series. Eight episodic chapters look at different types of burial practice in Roman and early medieval Britain, each beginning with a single unusual case study before spinning out a broader story. The decapitated Suffolk child is a route into “deviant” or “irregular” burials, the history of beheading per se, stories of revenants and the medieval walking dead, and the nature of Roman slavery. A chapter on a rare “pipe burial” – in which burned human bones were placed in a clay vessel with a tube sticking out aboveground, so that wine or blood could be poured in to nourish the remains – allows Roberts to discuss cremation and commemoration rituals, as well as the clash of Roman and non-Roman cultures in the 1st century AD.
The case studies here are not always obscure or original. In discussing burial cultures in Anglo-Saxon England, Roberts relies partly on the Staffordshire Hoard of grave goods unearthed in 2009, which is one of the most famous discoveries of recent years. However, throughout the book she draws on her practical experience studying bones in the field or the laboratory to find new insights and angles on apparently familiar stories. And she treads a skilful line between basic historical scene-setting, detailed discussion of the scientific techniques used in studying ancient bones, and gushing, TV-style, about her personal reaction to skeletons that often bear marks of abuse and physical – even lethal – violence.
Choleric readers may find themselves spluttering at this last aspect of the book – the insistence that old bones cannot simply be studied, but must also be empathised with. One chapter – which begins with another mutilated child, possibly chopped to bits to save the mother’s life during a breech birth – is accompanied by a full-blown trigger warning, suggesting that sensitive readers may wish to skip it entirely. But this is the 21st century, like it or not. And Roberts’s legions of fans will find themselves delighted by a book that is both accessible and expert, wears deep learning lightly, and provides a solid introduction to an often murky age in Britain’s early medieval past.