Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain by Alice Roberts

Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain Reviews

• 
  Leo

  This was very informative and I loved reading and learning. Will probably not remember much of it but an great non fiction. Hope I got more of Alice Robert's books to read on my book app.
• 
  Sarah Kimberley

  Buried by Alice Roberts was just brilliant and captivating. A carefully produced book. Buried is a renewal of ancient burials, weaving together stories of the dead. Romans, Vikings, Children🏺
  
  Roberts’ journey as an esteemed archaeologist takes us into the vivid world of bones and grave goods: an indication of people’s wealth, status and religious beliefs. Roberts explores various excavations which have unearthed the dark ages and before that, Roman Britain. From plagues to ancient artefacts left behind by migrating people. More and more we are moving ever closer to our past and heritage, rather than moving further from it.
  
  Though it is grisly work uncovering death, I have loved learning about ancient artefacts throughout the book and how these can be traced back to their origin. Anything from brooches and buckles, Byzantine buckets to beaver teeth associated with a “ cunning woman” whose remains had been uncovered ( ( early 14c., conning, "learned, skillful, possessing knowledge”). Alice Roberts is the most down to earth, honest and compassionate historian/archaeologist I have come across.
• 
  Linds

  Dr. Alice Roberts describes several sites of the Dark Ages. She tells the facts they reveal and the mysteries and questions they bring up.
• 
  Rhian Pritchard

  Me? Remembering to update my goodreads??
  
  Anyway yes, I finished this one a while ago. Jumped on the proof, dropped everything to read it, regret nothing. I love reading Alice Roberts' books - she's so full of joy and enthusiasm and compassion, it really rings archaeology to life. But she's so thoughtful and considered too, I always feel like I go away not just with renewed energy, but food for thought.
  
  This could be seen as a direct sequel to 'Ancestors' - it picks up, time-wise, where Ancestors left off, taking us from the prehistoric and iron age burials that were the focus of that into the romano-british landscape and into the early middle ages. As always, I've come away with a new understanding of history, and a plethora of fun and unusual facts to fling at my colleagues.
  
  The one waring is that the entire first chapter is about baby burials. It's fully signposted and very sensiitvely done, but it's very much worth knowing that the opening is about child mortality.
• 
  Graham Catt

  Another excellent book from Alice Roberts, who reexamines 1000 years of British history, using archaeology and genetic research.
  
  Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in archaeology or history.
• 
  Jo

  In this follow-up to Ancestors, Roberts looks at various funerary and death rites in Britain's prehistory. I find archaeology fascinating and love how sometimes a small discovery can tell us so much about how people in the past lived and died. Roberts writes in such a way that brings the past closer and makes everything so intriguing.
• 
  Oliver Shrouder

  Loved this book - i found the exploration of burial sites a bit more engaging here than in Ancestors, but the overall message was a bit overstated. The final 70 or so pages are a reiteration of the central ideas of genealogy and migration, which are better utilised during the examples of grave sites. Other than that another great book from this author
• 
  Marjorie Jones

  I love Alice Roberts, her enthusiasm, the depth and breadth of her knowledge and expertise, and the gift she has for bringing the past to life. It's fascinating how modern analysis techniques have transformed archaeology. Old bones and artefacts can now tell us far more about our ancestors and the way they lived (and died) than ever our very recent predecessors would have thought was possible.
  
  This felt quite a long book, but I think it was because every page was packed with interesting and fascinating details. I did find the final chapter, which was more about people and their movement, rather than the artefacts they left behind, rather slow going and more academic. I may possibly have skipped a few sections in that chapter. :-)
  
  Although not a central topic of this book, she traces how the adoption of Christianity as an organised religion shaped the way our ancestors lived and died, and how our ancestors shaped Christianity to meet their own aspirations and political ends, when the Anglo-Saxons, like the Romans before them, began to realise the exceptional potential of institutionalised religion.
  
  Interestingly, people only started to be buried in churchyards from the sixth century CE - again, a consequence of the development of Christian doctrine. Prior to that, almost all burials took place outside settlements.
  
  If you're interested in how our ancestors lived, the evidence they left, and the scientific methods used to decode the evidence, then this book is highly recommended.
• 
  Ellen

  A very interesting discussion of burials and how they help us understand the past. Useful discussion about terms to describe specific groups of people. There are graphic, but appropriate descriptions of violence.
• 
  Jess

  I love Prof Alice Roberts tv programs but this audiobook mostly was like listening to someone read a dissertation - full of passion, but hard to wade through.
  
  The early chapters were good. I especially appreciated the discussion of gendering remains (of interest to like minded Queers and hence the shelf tag).
  
  Otherwise, I mostly used this as an ASMR.
• 
  Craig Chapman

  Really interesting read and view of 1000 years of British history
• 
  emma june

  This and Ancestors are both so morbidly fascinating. Roberts discusses funerary and death rites in the Roman, Dark Ages and Anglo-Saxon eras of Britain, using a selection of archaeological finds to lay out history and educated guesses. These books are readable and informative, and cover a multitude of supposed genders, ages and cultures.
• 
  Raven

  Let me summarise the book to save everyone hundreds of pages of waffle. They found large collections of babies graves who died very soon after birth - they don’t know why. They found quite a few graves including those of children with their heads chopped off mostly after death - they don’t know why. They found a large collection of what they believe to be men buried with weapons - they don’t know why. They found a load of women buried with handbags and lots of things inside - they don’t know why. A random group of people was found by a wall and no one knows where they came from. In the sixth century church yards became popular. And finally we have no idea exactly when anything occurred because there are no/extremely bias records. The pictures at the back are interesting though so maybe skip to that bit 😅
  
  Honestly this entire book could have been summarised into about 50 pages - what they found, where they found it and potential theories. Not repeating the same one or two theories over and over and over again. If the theories were in any way interesting at least it would take some of the repetition away but honestly it was so dull by the end I couldn’t care if it was a ritual performed by aliens. Absolute agony. I wish I had quit it after the first 2 chapters but with so many positive reviews I had to continue but I wish I hadn’t bothered.
• 
  Carlton

  Beginning chapters with a particular archaeological find, Roberts gently provides the historical context in an easily accessible narrative style. This is a series of archaeological “snapshots” from Britain in the first millennium. Well written and showing wide knowledge of the period, I didn’t find this as engaging as her previous book,
  Ancestors: A History of Britain in Seven Burials.
  We start in Roman Britain, with the cremated remains in a rectangular lead canister with a “pipe” to the surface in a stone-lined chamber at Caerleon. The remains were discovered in the 1920’s, but Roberts re-examines them telling the story of the probable funerary rites.
  
  We then move to Yewden Roman Villa and the potentially upsetting discovery of evidence of obstetric surgery for an obstructed labour (or perhaps abortion) on a 36-37 week old foetus. Roberts discusses increased infant mortality in non-modern, first world locations and different burial practices for infants.
  
  This is followed by discussion of decapitated burials, starting with an example of seventeen decapitated Roman period burials at Great Whelnetham cemetery, near Bury St Edmunds, which distinguishes between victims of beheadings and post-mortem decapitations. Roberts emphasises that there can be no ‘one size fits all’ approach to the post-mortem decapitations, discussing possible fear of revenants, the ‘evil dead’, but also considering the idea that that some may be slaves.
  
  https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/ne...
  Although this may all sound very “dry” and academic, Roberts is able to make me empathise with the possible fates of the individuals of whom all that remains are these bones, and tentatively suggest the non-aristocratic lives they may represent. The lack of evidence always means that there are no simple answers, just a number of hypotheses, or believable stories.
  
  A metal detectorist located a beautifully designed Byzantine brass bucket at Breamore, Hampshire, and a Time Team archaeological dig then found the remains of an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery. Roberts looks at whether the findings from the site might indicate a warriors’ burial ground, a (Justinian) plague cemetery or perhaps a cemetery from a battle.
  
  Chapter 5 starts with a description of the Staffordshire Hoard buried in the mid-seventh century - “there's about 4 kilograms of gold in the hoard, 1.7 kilograms of silver and thousands of garnets. It's the largest hoard in Europe, let alone Britain.”
  However, Roberts makes the point that whilst rich in artefacts, hoards have no archaeological context, so she goes on to discuss the review of artefacts found at a large Anglo-Saxon cemetery at the Meads, northwest of Sittingbourne in Kent amongst other sites.
  Chapter 6 discusses skeletons found in a ditch at Llanbedrgoch on Anglesey, were they Welsh defenders of the site, captured Viking raiders, or slaves. Again there are no definitive answers, just possibilities that may make greater sense given the other material finds at the site.
  
  Chapter 7 discusses the “Birth of Churchyards”:
  Churchyards in the popular imagination seem like obvious, natural places to find graves, but they only start to appear in Britain from the sixth century as part of the culture of Christianity. None of the Roman or early Anglo-Saxon burials we've paused to look at on this journey through the first millennium took place inside settlements (apart from those infant burials). And yet, by the ninth century, pretty much everyone living in what had once been the Roman Empire - and where the Roman religion had taken root was buried in a church graveyard. The preceding centuries saw a gradual transformation of burial practices, as former out-of-town cemeteries fell into disuse, and churchyards became the final destination of choice.
  Chapter 8 looks at how archaeological DNA analysis (aDNA) is allowing archaeologists to ask and sometimes answer questions that couldn’t previously have been answered with such certainty:
  This is the archaeological culture war: in one corner, culture-history, massive migrations and population replacement; in the other, cultural diffusion, a dissemination of ideas while the population stays put. Like any culture war, it's much too polarised and too clearly defined. History - people - are much messier than that. The answers are much more likely to lie somewhere in the middle. They sure as hell won't be simple - and each 'event' would also have been different and unique. And we're only just starting to get the data we need to understand these transitions.
  Roberts discusses these ideas, but doesn’t yet have genomic results to help push the discussion further with empirical data, so that although interesting, this chapter rehashed ideas that I have read about in other recent books about this period.
  
  In the first chapter Roberts includes some thoughts about belief systems and burial rites relevant to the cremated bones of a Roman burial, but she pushes her personal views just a little too much in my opinion for what is otherwise a relatively objective analysis, which I felt was a disappointment, although I don’t personally disagree with the views she expresses.
• 
  Jean Marriott

  I love Roberts books. However this got a little preachy in parts.
• 
  Janice Chan

  This is the Simon & Schuster ebook edition, not Kindle, but Goodreads doesn't list it in their editions.
  
  In Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain, Dr. Alice Roberts (of Digging for Britain on the BBC), postulates that perhaps we have it all wrong about the Anglo-Saxon invasion and the term "Anglo-Saxon" as it's applied in Britain. The archaeological evidence just doesn't support these older theories in many cases. The written evidence that we have comes a few hundred years after the events described by the likes of Bede in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, who tells us the names of kings with suspiciously British names (Cerdic and Cynric, for example), who supposedly had Germanic roots. The archaeological evidence (burial practices and grave goods) suggest not only that older, native British burial rites were wide-spread, but that grave goods suggest a far closer connection to more northern regions of Europe.
  
  She also suggests that Roman influence before the supposed Anglo-Saxon invasion may not have been as pervasive outside of major centres, again, because the archaeological evidence just doesn't seem to support it.
  
  Roberts presents evidence both for and against this theory, in a very readable way for even the reader who has no previous knowledge of British history from the Iron Age to 1066.
  
  At least in this ebook edition, the many photos of artifacts and digs are at the end of the book (along with an extensive reference list), although there are some drawings within the text. That makes it difficult to look at what is being described as you're reading.
  
  
• 
  Tanya

  The idea of British culture (and the British population) being enriched by all these civilising influences – bringing farming, metalworking, Roman civilisation and the rest – is a colonialist construction: the incomers are a Good Thing. But this origin myth – the idea of civilising influences spreading from the east – is balanced against another in which indigenous culture evolves, with a home-grown hero like Boudica pitted against a tyrannical regime.[loc. 3670]

  Alice Roberts examines several unusual burials from Roman and medieval times, and uses them to illustrate the diversity and the history of the first millennium AD in Britain. As she writes, these are 'the traces of ordinary lives, and people whose stories were never written down': there's a fair amount of speculation here in these very human stories, like the man buried with a pipe poking out of the earth above the grave, which may have its roots in Greek Orthodox tradition: wine, or blood, may have been poured down the pipe as a way of including the deceased in a graveside feast. (Apparently this custom was also practiced in Soviet Russia.)

  Roberts explains, clearly and without jargon, the intricacies of determining gender and biological sex from burials, and how it's important not to project modern cultural concepts onto the dead. Early archaeologists had a tendency to assign sex and gender based on grave goods (brooches for women, swords for men) but osteoarchaeology shows that there isn't a definite correlation between the biological sex of a skeleton -- where it can be determined: the majority can't -- and the goods in their grave. Roberts mentions a number of theories: heirloom jewellery in a man's grave; jewellery worn by men and women alike; individuals biologically male living as female, and vice versa.

  Some of the burials discussed here are poignant, such as the remains of a very young child (perhaps a late foetus) which had been dismembered, most likely during obstetric surgery. There are lethal acts of violence, too, with little care being taken over the interment of the bodies: decapitated corpses, possibly victims of 'headhunting' or of superstitions about the walking dead, and a group of 'foreigners' found in a ditch in Anglesey, their bones revealing that they came from as far away as Scandinavia, to be executed with considerable violence.

  The mention of 'foreigners' is deliberate: Roberts is interested in the narratives of waves of invasion in the post-Roman period -- 'Gildas, Bede and then the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle present this picture of a Roman, Christian culture destroyed by pagan, Saxon culture' -- and argues that it's more likely to have been peaceful migration, or at least assimilation of raiders. And she's keen to emphasise that there have always been migrants, and always been people whose families have lived in the same place for a long time, and that these two groups have intermixed over the centuries.

  Highly readable, with clear explanations of the cutting-edge science of archaeogenetics, and a pleasing balance between the raw data of archaeology and its human context. Even before I'd finished reading Buried I'd started on Alice Roberts' more recent book, Ancestors: review soon.
• 
  Amolhavoc

  Mixed feelings about this one. I loved the subject matter, but found it very difficult to concentrate on the book. The first three case studies are properly enthralling, covering pipe burials, evidence of infanticide, and decapitated burials, but after this I found it very hard to maintain my concentration. Roberts emphasises the messiness of history and the impossibility of pigeon-holeing individuals as "just another Anglo-Saxon", questioning the evidence for a population-replacing Germanic conquest in the 5th-6th centuries and interrogating core assumptions about English national identity in the process. These are all super exciting ideas and very much my sort of thing, but I really struggled to follow the line of argument on several occasions, and found that the narrative often veered way off the point it was meant to illustrate. It would perhaps have been better to read it off the page than listen to the audiobook, so that I could have gone back to check things more easily. Roberts' enthusiasm and scholarship easily deserve four stars, but this was very much a three-star listening experience for me.
• 
  Ruth Dipple

  Alice Roberts is brilliant on bones and archaeology in general. In this book she takes a long hard look at some historical assumption about the first millennium in Britain, too, in particular the great Anglo-Saxon migration theory. Her understanding of the genetic research enables her to come to a more nuanced viewpoint, which is well worth reading.
  The topics she covers are diverse and interesting, from infant burials to the birth of churchyards.
  However I think her humanist bias (she is an office holder in the British Humanist Association) though freely disclosed, leads her into some unnecessary sniping at religion and Christianity in particular. She even maintains (p.78) that book-burning was a Christian policy although she offers no evidence to substantiate that claim.
  It's a shame that the book is marred in this way. One expects something more impartial from an academic author, even in a popular book.
  Also the name of the Greek historian Pausanias is spelled incorrectly both in the text and the index (though this could be an editing issue).
• 
  Dan Ratcliffe

  Prof. Roberts writes with an engaging modesty and this is an easy book to read without being in any way reduced in the quality of its ideas. The book takes us on a rapid tour of the first millennium in Britain using osteoarcharchaeology (bone stuff) as a way to personalise each case study. These chapters are 'bite sized' and well arranged - I got the feeling that the most engaging ones had been put towards the start and end. The book does well to challenge the artificial containers of the 'first millenia'and 'Britain' as well as robustly dismissing the nationalistic baggage of terms like Celt, Anglo Saxon etc whilst still stressing that people move and cultures melt into one another - forging their own identity rather than depending on imported or enforced ones- and, well, that being a good thing and all. Throughout you get a good idea of the humanist empathy and concern of the author.
• 
  Ana

  If you've read other books by Alice Roberts, this one is no different (well, apart from the topic).
  
  The book is quite easy to read and it provides a good perspective (albeit, somewhat broad) of what archaeological research on burials entails. The book is particularly good at demonstrating what type of information can be gathered from burials by archaeologists and how it is analysed, without forgetting to mention the pitfalls of current research (and the unavoidable fact that we'll never know everything, or most likely, most of things).
  
  On another note, the publishers should have done a much better job of proofreading this book. It can't be that hard to check for repeated words, or sentences poorly written.
• 
  Rhys Causon

  While I have been on a bit of a Non Fiction kick lately this one from Alice Roberts didn’t grab me as much as it could have, especially in comparison to other Alice Roberts book.
  
  I don’t know how to say it in a better way than this book seems to ramble a little more than previous books I’ve read/listened to by Alice Roberts.
  
  So this one many became background noise for me.
  
  I’m not saying there’s isn’t some fascinating information in this book but it wasn’t as interesting as Ancestors was to me. Maybe other people would get more out of it than me because I’m not exactly the biggest fan of the Roman era in Britain which takes up a huge chunk of the book.
• 
  Linda Phillips

  Once again Professor Alice Roberts educates and delights us with a fascinating look at the post-Roman period in Britain, the so-called dark ages and addresses the debate on the Anglo-Saxon invasion. It's the commonest account of that era, but did it happen? Was it an invasion or simply the steady migration of families?
  Professor Roberts looks at the issue in the light of more burials and the DNA revelations from them.
  Her archaeological experience combines with the ability to tell a good story, making this required reading for anyone with an interest in the period and is highly recommended.
• 
  LJ

  4.75 stars
  Alice Roberts' writing is just so enthralling and interesting that I didn't want to put this down.
  I think I liked this even better than the first book and really liked how it was focused on individual people or groups of people and what evidence can be found from their bones and what they were buried with.
  I was less interested in the latter part of the book where it discussed ideas more generally but overall a fascinating read. Can't get enough of Alice Roberts' work.
• 
  Shawn Thrasher

  A fascinating look at the state of modern archaeology and the use of ancient DNA to tell us more about the lives of people buried thousands of years ago. Unlike the murder mystery that I wanted this to be, even ancient DNA can't answer all the questions, leaving archaeologists - and the reader - with plenty of unsolved mysteries. But even with those mysteries, Roberts lets us know how archaeologists are filling in the gaps to reveal a richer life in the Roman period and so called "dark ages."
• 
  Terra

  Not sure why I’ve been on this Dark Ages history kick, but here we are. I’ve liked basically everything I’ve read from Alice Roberts, and the contents here were delivered with her usual clear, earnest enthusiasm. That said, this one caught me a little less than others I think because it’s a subject I was already relatively familiar with. I did appreciate her discussion of why all this matters and the importance of nuance, particularly given how often things like migration, ethnicity, and cultural change get oversimplified and hauled into service for obnoxious political reasons.
• 
  Cathy

  Excellent history writing, making knowledge just as thought provoking and complex as one might expect. Debunking ideas of simple, linear paths through our human past. Life has always been complex with migration and cultural diversity, shifting changes and fluctuating communities. Would recommend to any reader interested in the distant past with a focus on Britain and how these lands still hold so many questions and mysteries. This is certainly not a textbook of facts, but instead a sharing of experiences made through the examination of bones, digs and artefacts.