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

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”. 

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