Buried by Alice Roberts - Review

"History dishes up a sequence of events" explains Roberts “It also tends to focus on the drama of high politics, kings, and queens. Archaeology does something very different: it shows changing patterns, evolving styles…we also see ordinary people doing ordinary things, laid out in their graves with their extraordinary ordinary jewellery”.

By matching the extraordinary-ordinary folk with their broad historical context, Buried combines both archaeology and history to tell the intricate story of Britain at every level. She considers the influence of kings, queens, religion, and kingdoms, but acutely remembers they are made up of individuals. 

“Whatever kings, war leaders and ambitious bishops get up to, there are always the people tiling the fields, sowing the crops, getting the harvests in." 

Roberts reminds a reader that history is an intimate web of individual experiences. Through burial sites, she explores each's part in making up the groups, movements, and peoples that combined their languages, practices, fashions, and beliefs to build what we now know as Britain's broader past. Roberts uses burial sites as a springboard to showcase her broad historical knowledge. She brings in similar or un-similar burials to paint a portrait of context in the ever-changing and evolving island, refers to historical texts as reference points, and draws comparisons to modern-day practices to deepen our human connection to our past.

Like in Ancestors, Roberts expertly combines her anatomical, human, historical, and archaeological experiences and knowledge to articulate the lives of the people she finds in their burial sites. She draws a thread through to the past, describing her research, digging process and setting in acute detail, as well as the burial that placed the bones there. It is tender whilst medically and clinically sophisticated.

How the dead are treated, Roberts explains, says infinite amounts about their lives and the societies they lived in, and she uncovers this through painstaking research, explanations and speculation.

The book is as much informative as it is passionate. She takes a reader through her wanderings and wonderings through archaeology, time, and her awe-inspiring expertise.