Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials

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Burial 5: The Amesbury Archer from 2400-2300 BCE i.e. 4,400 years ago, buried a few miles from Stonehenge.

If he came directly by the shortest route (which he certainly wouldn’t have done) this was a journey of almost 1,000km which Google Maps tells me will take 171 hours of constant walking. This level of mobility in such a high status individual at this time is amazing. Actually, the burials themselves are rather pre-history of Britain, but as the story of each burial includes the history of its initial discovery and of its further investigation, the "history" in the title is not irrelevant as many of these burials had been known since nineteenth century. In a way, this book is also the history of archaeology in seven burials. One of its main topics is DNA analysis -- the new insights into prehistory that it provides as well as its limitations.Those Neolithic burials are about making a statement in the landscape. They’re about territory; about saying: This is ours; this has always been ours. This is where our family has been for many generations, and this is our family tomb. And so it goes. Roberts takes us through her seven burials, using them to describe two centuries of British archaeology, its advances and controversies. She does occasionally touch on human prehistory -- this typically happens when she quotes some actual archaeologist whom she interviewed. ( Roberts, it should be said, I also formed the impression that this was not the polished book that Roberts might have hoped to complete, as some of the genome research has been delayed by prioritising Covid-19 work, and reports for other excavations have not yet been completed. However, this does not detract from the book, and makes one appreciate all the more that archaeology is a developing subject and not static. This is a detailed and richly imagined account of the deep history of the British landscape, which brings alive those “who have walked here before us”, and speaks powerfully of a sense of connectedness to place that is rooted in common humanity: “we are just the latest human beings to occupy this landscape”.

She gets down to some juicy evidence as well. Gnawed human bones made by human teeth and cutmarks indicating cannibalism in the caves at Cheddar Gorge. Did our Neanderthal friends bury their dead? Are the Beaker people invaders? Chariot burials during Iron Age times. Intriguing stuff.

Table of Contents

Alice Roberts uses the lens of archaeology to explore British history. In many ways Roberts represents the new wave of historians who are able to approach via multiple disciplines, as Roberts expertly and effortlessly interweaves historical narrative with descriptions of ancient burials, tombs with the biographies of the pioneers who excavated them; under Roberts’s skilful pen myths are transformed into rich historical narratives and, just like the archaeologists she extolls in the book, she is able to gradually chip away at uncertainties and find new and often surprising truths. IT’S THROUGH a mix of new science and some good old-fashioned anatomy that Alice Roberts opens up secrets of the grave.