Review of Ancestors: Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials by Alice Roberts, pub. Simon & Schuster

[sheenaghpugh]

As some will already know, I have a real thing about osteoarchaeology, so this is a title I was never going to resist – hell, the cover illustration had me hooked. In addition, it is about the relatively neglected but fascinating pre-Roman period. 

Alice Roberts was originally a doctor, who gravitated via anatomy to palaeopathology and osteoarchaeology and is well known as a TV presenter. She was at one time working toward a professorship in anatomy but seems to have settled for one in “public engagement with science”, which sounds more like PR than anything else. Nonetheless, she knows her subject and has written an absorbing book about ancient funerary customs and what we can deduce from them. If the latter is often hedged about with caveats, this is how science is meant to be: her refusal to come up with the kind of easy answers one often finds in newspaper headlines on this topic is admirable. Late in the book, she refers to the huge shift from burial to cremation in Britain over the course of a century (78% of bodies are now cremated, as opposed to 0.7% in 1900), and points out how easy it would be for our distant descendants to attribute this to a seismic shift in religious belief, when in fact it came about for reasons of hygiene, cost and lack of space in cemeteries. It is a salutary warning not to make assumptions like “graves with swords = male; graves with mirrors = female”. 

She is also admirably upfront about her own beliefs (relevant in the context of how she interprets burials), especially given how this may influence some Amazon reviewers. One can only cheer at this:

“nowhere can we point to a circumscribed Beaker ‘race’ […] because the fundamental idea of ‘race’ is flawed.  It makes no sense biologically or historically. In fact it doesn’t make any sense to anyone apart from people who are determined to ignore complex reality in order to persist in being racist.”

Her characterisation of the promise of an afterlife as a “Ponzi scheme” (she is the current president of the Humanist Association) is brave, too.

However there are a few things that would stop me giving this five stars as opposed to four. One is the truly miserly paucity of illustrations, in a book that would be greatly enhanced by them. A few monochrome line drawings just don’t cut it. Simon & Schuster are a big house; couldn’t they run to some colour photos? There are also too many typos, so presumably they economised on proof-readers as well. And the indexing could be better – the notion of “race” is discussed several times in the book, but you will look in vain for that word in the index.

Another problem for me is a slight over-chattiness in the tone. Granted, this is “popular science” and so can afford more colloquialisms; I’ve no quarrel, for instance, with contractions like isn’t and weren’t. But I could do without ultra-colloquialisms like “get one’s knickers in a twist” and I would even more happily lose the irrelevant personal travel information that bedevils this kind of book; “I take the train to Salisbury again, and Adrian picks me up from the station”. She also has an odd way of getting over the problem of the Paviland body, which became famous as the “Red Lady” before it was realised to be male. She keeps the name but uses male pronouns with it, which just sounds odd. Her reason – “the name has stuck” – doesn’t convince; well, unstick it, then! Call him Paviland Man, or what you will, always provided you don’t use Neil Oliver’s excruciating coinage “Red Laddie”.

But with these caveats, this is an essential book for anyone like me who is addicted to the whole idea of reading the absorbing stories to be found in bones and burials.