Buried
An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain
Alice Roberts
Having read it
★★★☆☆
It seemed like a book with a decent theme, benefiting from the skills and talents of its author and started (and ended reasonably) well. It just felt like it didn’t really have a decent narrative to tie it all together and help it flow.
Couldn’t help feel, while reading, that the author was encouraged to make another book, after (the – unforeseen? – success of) Ancestors, by its publisher.
Given, no doubt, the many notes from the first that would justify a second, with a few more relevant and timely events added to them, another would be worthwhile and then help build up to a third book – one to complete the set and help make the series a bit more marketable to the mainstream: ABC.
Still, it had a few decent passages of down-to-earth and sensible opinions about archaeology and social and cultural views and perspectives; we all need to be more conscious and aware of our contemporary biases and the always seeming need to categorise and reduce many things in (the present and) history to specific dates and eras, rather than better appreciating and understanding that all life is diverse, complicated and not easily, if at all, worth being labelled and filed to benefit something or someone else’s ideas, objectives or servers.
A good passage
History becomes very personal – as we learn about people who lived in this land all those centuries before us. Their lives were different to ours in so many ways, but there are also moments of striking similarity, when you can suddenly grasp a thread of familiarity and empathy that stretches back through time, and is part of a wider story about what it means, what it feels like, to be human.
A second good passage
What might seem odd, unusual or even macabre to us may not have been seen that way in the past. The Ashanti people of west Africa used to deflesh their dead kings, rendering them skeletal, before reassembling their bones with gold wire. Members of the Hapsburg-Lorraine royal family who died away from home were reputedly boiled in wine before being gutted and defleshed, leaving just their skeletons to be conveyed home. (This is probably a very sensible alternative to attempting to transport a complete corpse that would have started to rot fairly quickly.) Although these customs strike us as bizarre, the Ashanti and Hapsburg-Lorraine royals would undoubtedly have raised an eyebrow at our most common funerary custom in Britain today: burning the dead in gas incinerators and grinding up their calcined bones to a fine powder afterwards.
Language stymies us too. Using the word ‘deviant’ implies that burials we label in this way are somehow ‘not normal’. But then, what is normal? There’s not a single approach to funerary rites from which those burials represent a departure. They represent particular variants within a range of diverse approaches.
It’s very possible that what strikes us as unusual today – prompting us to label it ‘deviant’ – was simply not seen that way at the time. Decapitated burials are relatively common in third- and fourth-century Roman Britain – common enough to be considered as a variant of normal, rather than deviant or even ‘irregular’.
A third good passage
Ethnic groups turn out to be illusory, or at the very least arbitrary – in the first millennium in Britain, and today. They have no clearly defined boundaries, and inclusion in an ethnic group is based on a range of different characteristics, principally geographic, with some biological and some cultural features thrown into the mix.
The idea of a significant migration into Britain after the Roman period has obviously played a role in the emergence of English identity. We can see that in the writings of Gildas and Bede, and in the way that Anglo-Saxon kings created those genealogies for themselves, so keen to emphasise their Germanic roots and connections.
[...]
The past is another country, but it bleeds and seeps into the places we inhabit today. We use history to help construct our own individual social identities – from family history to national and international history. It also underpins and flows through modern geopolitics – in how we construct ideas about nationhood, and how we think about borders, mobility and migration. History and archaeology do not exist in a bubble, sealed away from the present.