Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials

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It’s an even more recent breakthrough that particularly fascinates her: ancient genomics. The science of reading ancient DNA. The word liminal has two meanings, the first is “boundary”, the second is “I’ve spent too much time hanging out with archaeologists”. ↩︎ To give a more concrete example of the slightly wayward delivery: the last chapter is a reflection on death and the options for burial today: under a tree, dissolved into fertiliser, donated to medical science... but then starts swinging for religion, Dawkins style, calling it a delusional ponzi scheme that is unfit for the modern rational mind. Even for me as an atheist it all seems a bit... unnecessary. Overall, I enjoyed this book for the details of new excavations and the Salisbury Museum segments. I wouldn’t recommend it for your first British archaeology book (I read Britain Begins by Barry Cunliffe about five years ago and would recommend that), but it is good general book to read if you want to explore further.

Some readers might find this book with its constant talk about burials and bones too macabre for their taste, but I quite enjoyed it, including the overview of British burial practices from ancient to modern times. After all, paleontology and prehistory is very much about bones and burials. Besides, death doesn't disappear if we don't mention it--at least, I'm long past this pleasant illusion.Let’s return to that Red Lady skeleton. Just by looking at the carefully preserved bones (which she lays out in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History), Alice can see from the left pelvic bone that – far from being a witch – this was an adult male. Mind-bogglingly, radio-carbon dating carried out in 2006 indicated he lived 34,000 years ago, well before the peak of the last Ice Age. In other words, his is the earliest burial found anywhere in Britain.

I also found her dwellings on whether or not the earliest burials WERE deliberate burials or just left to nature fascinating and the development of the concept of an “after-life”. And when these ancient burials were discovered how Christian religions attempted to reconcile these discoveries with the stories of the Bible e.g. the great flood. Perhaps one of the problems – certainly when it comes to British prehistory - is the paucity of written accounts before the arrival of highly literate Romans on our isle. She also avoids too much jargon. My “jargon test” for any book on prehistory is how often the author uses the word “liminal” 6. I’m happy to report that Roberts restrains herself until chapter 8 and then only uses it once. The Amesbury Archer is preserved in Salisbury Museum and, according to Roberts, “our visits to museums, to gaze on such human remains, are a form of ancestor worship”. In her book, Roberts takes seven different prehistoric burials and explores who they may have been and what they reveal about their communities. It requires imagination, as well as scientific expertise, to read the “stories written in stone, pottery, metal and bone”.It also indicates population wide mobility - the genetic evidence from a range of skeletons seems to point to almost complete population replacement by these metal using “Beaker People”, taking over from the stone age Neolithic inhabitants of Britain who came before them. The likely reason for this, Roberts tells us, is that changes in climate disrupted the way of life of the Neolithic farmers, who saw a significant reduction in their population and abandoned the fields to rely on their herds of animals instead.

Indeed the grave itself contained nearly a hundred items – including copper knives, gold objects, boars’ tusks and a shale ring – making it the most richly furnished grave from the period that had ever been discovered in Britain. The grave goods and the broken remains of five distinctive pottery beakers with a characteristic upside-down bell shape revealed it to be a Beaker burial. As Alice Roberts writes, the number of items and the care with which the grave had been created shows that “the Archer was a Very, Very Important Person”. This is a terrific, timely and transporting book - taking us heart, body and mind beyond history, to the fascinating truth of the prehistoric past and the present' Bettany Hughes It takes Ancestors a while to warm up, but when it does, it is really fabulous. Roberts takes us through the detailed archaeology/anthropology of burials in Britain, exploring what we know and what we guess about what this means.Indeed, Alice Roberts was up at Uley Camp just the other weekend. ‘What a fantastic hillfort – the views are absolutely stunning!

The 'Red Lady of Paviland' skeleton, laid out in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (Image: Ethan Doyle White/Wikimedia/Creative Commons) This allows us to build up a picture of who the deceased were, but also to understand how much confidence we can have in these interpretations. She is careful to warn us of the dangers of over interpretation: unlike me Roberts never calls the Amesbury Archer the King of Stonehenge and is refreshingly scathing of those who get carried away with that sort of thing! Minimal jargon This is a terrific, timely and transporting book - taking us heart, body and mind beyond history, to the fascinating truth of the prehistoric past and the present’ Bettany Hughes Without being too territorial about it, if you live in a certain place and you go out for walks, you’re communing with the ancestors.

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Other remarkable insights that Roberts gleans from the bones are: a bigger than normal bone nodule on the top of his shoulder implies a well developed bowstring drawing muscle. Subtle clues in the finger bones point to an iron grip. And a missing left kneecap means he probably walked with a limp.