Grave insights

BRENNA HASSETT recommends an account of life and individual deaths - in Britain during the first millennium AD

- BRENNA HASSETT

ARCHAEOLOGY

Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain

by Alice Roberts

Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, £20

Professor Alice Roberts opens her warm and illustrative history of Britain's first millennium AD with an enigma. The enigma is, of course, made of bones, because Roberts is a broadcaster and author who has shared many of the best stories of British archaeology in the last 20 years by using the tools of her academic trade - most especially, her up-close and personal knowledge of the anatomy of death. Roberts' experience in parsing the complex scientific research behind the work of digging up the dead stands her in good stead here, as she takes the reader hundreds of years into the distant past.

The chapters flow through the centuries, occasionally eddying back and forth, but always taking in the vast number of ways to dispose of the dead in Britain. From a cremation at Caerleon 1,800 years ago, she takes us to the difficult world of death in infancy, exposing a tragic story told in tiny remains found at Yewden Roman villa. After that we visit the site of Great Whelnetham, where Roberts draws a line between decapitation burials, the brutalized bodies of slaves and the fear of the evil dead.