Alice Roberts - Buried : An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain

Sunday Times bestselling author

Professor Alice Roberts

Buried

An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain

Tendar, facinating Lucid and illuminating Robert Macfarlane

In memoriam

Kate Edwards

Theres a lot you can tell from a skeleton. As a biological anthropologist, Ive specialised in drawing out information from old bones. Its not always easy, and how much I can reliably infer depends on the state of preservation of the human remains. But I might be able to determine the biological sex of an individual, give a good idea of their age at death, and also offer some details about some of the illnesses and injuries they suffered during their lives.

In the last decade, the information I can extract by careful, visual analysis of bones and teeth, helped by the judicious use of X-rays, has been vastly extended by a range of different biochemical techniques. Its now possible to analyse the chemical composition of bones and teeth and draw inferences about where a person lived and what their diet was like. But were also experiencing a revolution in archaeology, driven by ancient DNA (aDNA). Archaeogeneticists are now able to extract DNA from ancient bones and sequence entire genomes. Its only just over two decades since the first single human genome was sequenced, and the pace of change in genetic technology has been breathtaking. Sequencing is now faster by several orders of magnitude, and we have the ability to compile whole DNA libraries drawn from both the living and the dead.

On an individual basis, an ancient genome can provide information about the sex of a person, and even provide clues to appearance. But the revelations become even more interesting when we start to compare genomes from different individuals, revealing family connections. And wider studies of relatedness and ancestry can help us to track changes at a population level. Amassed genomic data are starting to shed light on major population movements, mobility and migration in the past. Its an exciting time, but when new technologies burst onto the scene like this, they can also be disruptive. Scholarly feathers are ruffled, and sometimes the claws come out. The potential for huge advances in understanding is there but its also important not to rush to conclusions or to be seduced by sensational headlines about breakthroughs. We can be excited and cautious at the same time.

In prehistory, that great swathe of time before the written word, archaeology is the only way that we can hope to learn anything about our ancestors. We look at the physical traces of their culture, and at the remains of individuals themselves, usually reduced to just their bones and teeth but with precious DNA locked away inside those hard tissues, and now amenable to analysis.

Once we move into the realm of history, we have some documentary evidence to look at. The written history of Britain begins with occasional classical references to an island off the coast of continental northwest Europe, going back to the middle of the first millennium BCE Before the Common Era. (I use BCE/CE rather than BC/AD its the academic standard and is religiously neutral, as well as having been in use since the seventeenth century, so its not a new thing.) By the first century BCE, Britain is drawing the attention of the expanding Roman Empire, with Julius Caesar visiting in a not-particularly-friendly sort of way in 55 and 54, and Claudius following up with a full-on invasion in 43 CE. For almost four centuries after that, we have the luxury of quite a lot of written information about life in Roman Britain. I say luxury, but that history is both a blessing and a curse. First of all, its very biased it was necessarily produced by literate individuals, who were elite Romanophiles. Most of the classical authors who wrote about Roman Britain didnt even live here, such as the senators Tacitus and Dio Cassius. And they focused on military history, giving us a very skewed view. There are some written records from Roman Britain itself, but these are quite specialised and narrow in what they reveal. They include stone inscriptions, which once again give us a biased, military view as most are associated with the army. But since the 1950s, archaeologists have added to the corpus of writing from Roman Britain, finding ephemeral pieces of text that have, quite astonishingly, survived the test of time in the form of ink on thin wooden sheets, and scratched impressions of writing on the wooden casings of wax tablets. Again, these are often linked to military communities, but they do offer us different insights into life for Roman officials and army personnel in Britain. There are also some wax tablet finds from London which relate to legal and mercantile matters. Another set of written inscriptions comes in the form of curses or defixiones, on small lead sheets, deposited in springs and shrines. More often than not, the curse is asking a particular god to punish a thief with ill health, insomnia, infertility or even death. There are also makers marks on pottery, leather and silver, and scratched names on objects, too. And of course, there is writing on coins. Although writing turns up in a lot of places, those are mostly cities and military settings, and its thought that less than 5 per cent of the population of Roman Britain was literate.

All this documentary evidence is alluring, and theres something wonderful about suddenly knowing the names of groups of people and individuals. Before the Romans arrive, we didnt know that the people who lived in what is now Dorset called themselves the Durotriges, that people in Norfolk were the Iceni, or that modern Kent was inhabited by the Cantiaci. We didnt know the specific names of any British kings and queens. And suddenly we meet Cunobelinus, Caratacus, Verica, Togidubnus, Boudica, Prasutagus and the rest.

But all that history is also a curse. It suggests interpretations to us before we even start to look at the archaeological evidence. The archaeological discovery of a bit of burned sediment, some pottery and a Claudian coin in London might be interpreted as evidence of military occupation because we know the history of the Claudian invasion. But this isnt how archaeology should work. It shouldnt be a footnote to history or merely an illustration of what we think we already know. Its an entirely different source of evidence, and should enable us to ask much wider questions about what life was like in the past, and to test the historical interpretations, not to prove them. Of course, archaeology and history and now archaeogenetics too should come together in the final analysis, to tell the story of the past but these disciplines should be treated with equal respect and given equal weight. Archaeology also offers us the potential to understand society in a much more comprehensive way as we find the traces of ordinary lives, and people whose stories were never written down.

In the post-Roman period in Britain, contemporary written records all but disappear. Literacy is still there, but its harder to find traces of it. We get some glimpses from high-status sites, including monasteries. This is the period which used to be referred to as the Dark Ages, which is now seen as a pejorative term, suggesting that Britain descended into darkness, into a period of ignorance and barbarism, when the Roman army pulled out in the fifth century. But even if the term is problematic, theres no denying that the historical record for the fifth to eighth centuries is patchy at best. The few sources we possess have ended up carrying undue weight, introducing even more bias into our reconstructions of the past. Archaeology is crucially important to understanding what was really happening in those shadowy centuries after Roman rule in Britain ended. And burials have important tales to tell.