Grave insights
BRENNA HASSETT recommends an account of life – and individual deaths – in Britain during the first millennium AD
Professor Alice Roberts opens her warm and illustrative history of Britain’s first millennium AD with an enigma. e enigma is, of course, made of bones, because Roberts is a broadcaster and author who has shared many of the best stories of British archaeology in the last 20 years by using the tools of her academic trade – most especially, her up-close and personal knowledge of the anatomy of death. Roberts’ experience in parsing the complex scientific research behind the work of digging up the dead stands her in good stead here, as she takes the reader hundreds of years into the distant past.
e chapters flow through the centuries, occasionally eddying back and forth, but always taking in the vast number of ways to dispose of the dead in Britain. From a cremation at Caerleon 1,800 years ago, she takes us to the difficult world of death in infancy, exposing a tragic story told in tiny remains found at Yewden Roman villa. A er that we visit the site of Great Whelnetham, where Roberts draws a line between decapitation burials, the brutalised bodies of slaves and the fear of the evil dead.
Confronted with barrow graves containing two men and a child at sixth-century Breamore, or the mass graves found nearby, we see up close the difficulty in teasing out the truth of the past – had they died in a massacre, or from plague? – without the magic of ancient DNA to adjudicate. Meanwhile, the messy world of identity in “Anglo-Saxon” England is laid bare, bead by bead, bronze by bronze, burial by burial, revealing a far more cosmopolitan world than the Dark Ages misnomer would have you believe. Finally, the book winds its way to a discussion of the Christian patterns of burial that have become so familiar to our society today.
It is clear these are stories that are close to the heart, chosen because they allow Roberts to contemplate some of the universal themes that burial archaeologists must consider. e complicated nature of death, violence, status and belief are all part of this book; but so are science, storytelling and the modern technology cracking open the graves of the past. is book highlights Roberts’ ability to condense decades of academic study into a few relatable pages. As someone who has spent decades myself staring into the empty eye sockets of long-dead skulls, I was impressed with the ease of communication of what are really quite technical details in order to tell engaging tales of burials in the first millennium AD.
While I found myself nodding along with her depictions of the science, I was galloping along with her quick and dirty histories. ese are pitched at just the right level to sketch in a scene, but never so dense as to drown out the lives of the many di erent kinds of people who, a millennium or more ago, called Britain home.
Brenna Hassett is a biological anthropologist and a researcher at University College London. Her latest book is Growing Up Human: The Evolution of
Childhood (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2022)