Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain

Product Information

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. Interestingly, people only started to be buried in churchyards from the sixth century CE - again, a consequence of the development of Christian doctrine. History becomes very personal – as we learn about people who lived in this land all those centuries before us. However I noticed modern political and social opinions and attitudes creep into the work and writing.

Beginning chapters with a particular archaeological find, Roberts gently provides the historical context in an easily accessible narrative style. In it, he described how some of the British chieftains had pledged allegiance to Rome, and were happily paying duties on exports and imports between Britain and Gaul, managing ‘to make the whole of the island virtually Roman property’.However I think her humanist bias (she is an office holder in the British Humanist Association) though freely disclosed, leads her into some unnecessary sniping at religion and Christianity in particular. The Romans reacted in a way that was completely typical of a colonising superpower – they weren’t about to give up either. The book takes us on a rapid tour of the first millennium in Britain using osteoarcharchaeology (bone stuff) as a way to personalise each case study. I did find the final chapter, which was more about people and their movement, rather than the artefacts they left behind, rather slow going and more academic.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his (somewhat fanciful and not terribly reliable) History of the Kings of Britain, describes how Arthur chooses the City of Legions ‘upon the River Usk, near the Severn Sea’ as the venue for his coronation. With her easy, relaxed approach, observations and occasional humour she provides interesting and thought provoking insights into the world of ostio-archeology and the new discipline of ancient dna genome sequencing, which is beginning to provide additional - and as always sometimes controversial results regarding early population movements from Europe to the English mainland. Over her career, she worked with Mortimer on many excavations, including Segontium – the Roman fort at Caernarfon – and later, Verulamium (St Albans) and Maiden Castle in Dorset.Further excavations, on the amphitheatre, were carried out in the winter of 1926 into 1927, after the Daily Mail raised funds, with additional financial support coming in from – quite bizarrely – American fans of King Arthur.