{"id":13765,"date":"2022-05-16T13:02:18","date_gmt":"2022-05-16T11:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/?post_type=purple_issue&p=13765"},"modified":"2022-05-16T13:02:18","modified_gmt":"2022-05-16T11:02:18","slug":"grave-insights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/2022\/05\/16\/grave-insights\/","title":{"rendered":"Grave insights"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

ARCHAEOLOGY<\/strong><\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n

Grave insights<\/h1>\n\n

BRENNA HASSETT<\/span> <\/strong>recommends an account of life \u2013 and individual deaths \u2013 in Britain during the first millennium AD<\/h5>\n\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n

Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain <\/strong><\/p>\n\n

by Alice Roberts <\/p>\n\n

Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, \u00a320 <\/h5>\n\n

Professor Alice Roberts opens her warm and illustrative history of Britain\u2019s 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 \u2013 most especially, her up-close and personal knowledge of the anatomy of death. Roberts\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n

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 brutalised bodies of slaves and the fear of the evil dead.<\/p>\n\n

\"\"
Precious artefacts<\/span><\/strong> Gold crosses and the neck of a drinking bottle from a princely Anglo-Saxon burial. Alice Roberts uses grave goods to explore the world of those who made them<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

Confronted with barrow graves containing two men and a child at sixth-century Breamore, or the mass graves found nearby, we see up close the difficulty in teasing out the truth of the past \u2013 had they died in a massacre, or from plague? \u2013 without the magic of ancient DNA to adjudicate. Meanwhile, the messy world of identity in \u201cAnglo-Saxon\u201d England is laid bare, bead by bead, bronze by bronze, burial by burial, revealing a far more cosmopolitan world than the Dark Ages misnomer would have you believe. Finally, the book winds its way to a discussion of the Christian patterns of burial that have become so familiar to our society today.<\/p>\n\n

It is clear these are stories that are close to the heart, chosen because they allow Roberts It is clear these are stories that are close to to contemplate some of the universal themes that burial archaeologists must consider. The complicated nature of death, violence, status and belief are all part of this book; but so are science, storytelling and the modern technology cracking open the graves of the past. This book highlights Roberts\u2019 ability to condense decades of academic study into a few relatable pages. As someone who has spent decades myself staring into the empty eye sockets of long-dead skulls, I was impressed with the ease of communication of what are really quite technical details in order to tell engaging tales of burials in the first millennium AD.<\/p>\n\n

While I found myself nodding along with her depictions of the science, I was galloping along with her quick and dirty histories. These are pitched at just the right level to sketch in a scene, but never so dense as to drown out the lives of the many different kinds of people who, a millennium or more ago, called Britain home.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

\n\n

Brenna Hassett <\/strong>is a biological anthropologist and a researcher at University College London. Her latest book is Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood <\/em>(Bloomsbury Sigma, 2022)<\/p>\n\n

All products were chosen independently by our editorial team. Below is an affiliate link, and we may receive a commission for purchases made. Please read our affiliates FAQ section<\/a> to find out more.<\/p>\n\n

Buy now from Waterstones<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n

PICTURE CREDIT: ANDY CHOPPING\/MOLA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ARCHAEOLOGY Grave insights BRENNA HASSETT recommends an account of life \u2013 and individual deaths \u2013 in Britain during the first millennium AD Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain by Alice Roberts Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, \u00a320 Professor Alice Roberts opens her warm and illustrative history of Britain\u2019s first millennium AD 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Grave insights BRENNA HASSETT recommends an account of life \u2013 and individual deaths \u2013 in Britain during the first millennium AD Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain by Alice Roberts Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, \u00a320 Professor Alice Roberts opens her warm and illustrative history of Britain\u2019s first millennium AD…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13765"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13765"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14279,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13765\/revisions\/14279"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}