Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain

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But she is frequently repetitive; she is painfully conscious of the sensitivity of these issues, but does also spend a lot of time apologising for each point. Unfortunately, the pandemic intervened, and the Crick Institute suspended work on everything apart from coronavirus testing. Roberts repetitive weakness (IMHO) is extrapolating a Roman/Dark Age/Medieval cultural interpretation from burial and anatomical evidence by applying a 21st-century Humanist worldview. And the other mention is written in stone, an inscription carved into a great slab of Purbeck marble discovered in Chichester, during building work in 1723.

It’s 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.All in all, though, Buried is an enjoyable book, and one I would recommend to anyone with an interest in archaeology or British history. Roberts is the engaging star of a number of BBC programmes on archaeology, including Time Team and Digging for Britain. But further away from that point of contact with the continent, the Empire would surely have been seen very differently.

The key giveaway, as I see it, is the repeated, incessant, unending hype about the potential of archaeogenomics to answer all the open questions about migration and diffusion and whether populations displaced each other, or simply mixed around and in the process it was the cultural practices, rather than the people themselves, who gave way to the newcomers. More and more we are moving ever closer to our past and heritage, rather than moving further from it.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.