Review of Buried, by Alice Roberts, pub. Simon & Schuster UK 2022

[sheenaghpugh]

“There’s a lot you can tell from a skeleton.” Since I have an unhealthy interest in osteoarchaeology, this is my ideal opening sentence; in fact it convinced me to buy the book. Actually it is as much about what one can’t tell, or thinks one can tell, from burials as what one can. Burial customs, how a body lies in a grave and what is put in with it, can indeed tell us a lot, but there is a tendency to interpret what one sees in the light of what one expected to find. A good example is the one in chapter 5; at one time, finding a female Anglo-Saxon burial with half a dozen brooches, archaeologists tended immediately to think “high-status woman”. But brooches were not just decorative; they had the function, before buttons were invented, of fastening both dresses and cloaks. As archaeologist Hugh Willmott points out: “There’s a tendency to think: she must have been special, she’s wearing all these brooches. But perhaps she just died in winter, buried in her winter cloak. Maybe even two cloaks, if it was very cold.”

Until quite lately, what archaeologists could learn from a skeleton was often limited to sex, age, cause of death, perhaps an idea of what they looked like in life and what state of health they enjoyed. New techniques like genome and isotope analysis in this field have enabled archaeologists to find out a great deal more about bodies, and sometimes surprised them in the process. In particular, they can indicate family connections and where someone was brought up, which can often be a very long way indeed from where they were buried. The subtitle of this book is “An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain”, and it is “alternative” not just in the sense of viewing the time through the dead rather than the living but in trying not to visualise it as a succession of waves of invading hordes – Romans, Saxons, Vikings, one after another. There were invasions, and raids, but also a great deal of perfectly peaceful migration, and the different populations overlap both in time and in place more than one might think.

 Indeed many bodies, and pictorial representations, seem to show people (women especially) with a “hybrid identity”, wearing aspects of both Roman and North European dress and jewellery, presumably depending on what was in fashion at the time. Funeral customs too are often mixed. Sometimes folk who, judging by their dress, embraced Christian culture while alive are nevertheless buried in an older, non-Christian way, either because while dress is a matter of fashion, funeral rites are a matter of family tradition, or perhaps because their relatives felt this was no time for the deceased to make an enemy of any potential god and were hedging their bets. But sometimes too, there are elements of different cultures, perhaps those the people concerned originally came from, but modified, as if they are both keeping some of their ancestral rites and absorbing some from their current surroundings, making something new in the process. A custom from Frisia, whereby the dead ere often buried in log coffins, is mirrored in an 8th-century Norfolk cemetery.

This book is full of fascinating phenomena (I especially enjoyed the chapter on decapitated burials), but the archaeological detective work usually leads to theories rather than definite answers, which is as it should be. I’m glad to see that Simon & Schuster, this time, have sprung for some decent colour illustrations – they rather unforgivably didn’t in her last. Roberts’ writing style is sometimes a bit chatty and personal, but not so much as to become irritating. This book should interest anyone with a yen for ancient history, but especially those of us who’d rather dig up a skeleton than a pot of gold any day.