Gone Medieval - Burials with Alice Roberts

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

What do human remains - and the objects buried with them - tell us about people’s lives in Britain in the first millennium, what they thought about mortality, how they felt about loss, and what they believed came next?The anthropologist and author Professor Alice Roberts has been exploring the ways in which Ancient Britons bade farewell to their dead, examining sites of Roman cremations and graveside feasts, richly furnished Anglo Saxon graves and the first Christian burial grounds in Wales.In this episode Cat chats to Prof. Roberts about how combining archaeological finds with cutting-edge DNA research and written history sheds fresh light on how the dead lived.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store.Join the History Hit Book Club in time for the June and July read of Charles Spencer's, The White Ship. Become part of a community of readers who are passionate about history and its thrilling lessons. Members read a new book every 2 months, and get a £5 Amazon voucher towards the cost of the book, as well as exclusive access to an online Q&A between History Hit presenters and the author in the second month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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You can sign up today by following the link in the description below to start reaping the rewards of membership of History Hits Book Club. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm your host for today's episode. My name is Dr. Kat Jarman. Funery rituals. Show us what people in the past thought about mortality, about what they thought came next, about social structures and over time how societies changed and responded to invasions, migrations

and major political events. And by studying the remains of those who were buried, we can piece together their unique stories and put them into the bigger picture. This is precisely the topic of the brand new book by Professor Alice Roberts called Buried, an Internative History of the First Millennium in Britain. In her book, Alice sweeps through a thousand years of British history, combining historical sources, archaeology, and cutting-edge scientific research into human remains. Professor Alice Roberts is well known for her TV documentaries, not least the BBC archaeology series, digging for Britain. She has also written numerous books on a wide range of topics, including archaeology, evolution and anatomy.

She's also a professor of public engagement in science. at the University of Birmingham. I'm delighted to have Alice here on the podcast with me today to talk about her new book and also to discuss some of the biggest topics it covers, including what the latest scientific methods can contribute with in studying the medieval period. So Alice, thanks so much for joining us on Gone Medieval Today.

Thank you very much for having me. I'm straying into medieval times, so I think the first time, at least in literary form. Yes, absolutely. So this is quite a sort of move away from you, isn't it? Because most of your TV, well, your TV work goes all over the place, but especially your own books and your own series have gone actually down hundreds of thousands of years, even millions of years before, haven't they? So to prehistory. And did you find on this book, working on this sort of material, did you find that quite a challenge in comparison? Yeah, in some ways, it's interesting because I've always had this kind of dual, I suppose, fascination in biological anthropology, in both. the kind of evolutionary aspect of it, but then also the more recent aspect of it where, you know, we're looking at more recent archaeological human remains. And then I'm particularly interested in pathology. So I've always had that kind of dual interest. And I suppose actually

that goes right back to my PhD, which was looking at disease and ancient skeletons around the shoulder, but actually doing that from, it kind of combined both. So some of my PhD, I was looking at medieval skeletons and mapping these patterns of disease around the shoulder. And then for some of it, I was actually taking this much broader evolutionary approach in comparing human shoulders with chimpanzee and gorilla shoulders. So I've always had that dual thing. But what I haven't done before is, you know, written a whole book about the historical period.

So this book follows on from ancestors, which is about prehistoric Britain through the lens of burial archaeology. If I'm completely honest about it, Kat, it was going to be one book, which was going to go from prehistory to the present day. And then I realised I'd written so much. I didn't have about 120,000 words and I'd only got to the end of the Iron Age. So it ended up being a whole book on the prehistoric bit.

So that's why I'm now kind of writing the rest of it. But what I'm finding quite difficult, and I write about this in the very beginning, and I describe the history, the written documentation as a blessing and a curse, because it's wonderful to hear the names of people and the names of tribes and to know that the Duritriguez were living in Dorset

and the Salurys were living in South Wales. And there was someone called Budica, and somebody called Togged Dubness and those names are just so alluring and yet I want to focus on the archaeology I want the archaeology to speak for itself and I did find it quite difficult in the book every now and then I found the history kind of clamouring

and I would have to pull back from that and say okay I love all this stuff from Gildas and the venerable bead and all of that but actually what I'm trying to do is forefront the archaeology so actually the archaeology isn't just an illustration for the history. It's a whole whole body of information and knowledge in its own right. So yeah, I did find it tricky because

of course you don't have that in prehistory. Exactly. And I want to get back to some of those issues later on because quite often I think that history and historiography and actually the way that we've considered those sources has actually messed with and almost messed up some of the evidence because there's been a very strong bias towards the historical sources and the archaeology and things like the bones have had a bit of a sideline. But I want to get back to to that, well specifically a bit later on, because there's some really, really good examples in your book. But I also wanted to ask you, because on the sort of blur, on the back of your book, it's calling it an alternative history of the first millennium. And it's also telling us that you

focus, as you've just explained as well. It's on the archaeology, but it's very specifically on the bones and on the burials, especially. So just as a very wide question, is death or someone's death actually a useful way of learning about their life? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, we both do this, don't we? We both look at archaeological human remains and draw out biographical details from them. So, you know, at the point somebody dies, it's not as they, their whole body is cleansed of everything that's happened. You know, the skeleton is a record of what has happened during somebody's life. I say the skeleton, obviously, we rebuild our skeletons over time. but still you can see signs of, you know, ancient fractures that you might have had in childhood even.

So you've got this kind of document in bone of somebody's life if you know how to read it. And it's limited in some ways, but in other ways it's not. And this is why I became a university academic at the end of the day, because I was a medical doctor originally. And then I just was absolutely blown away by how much information you actually could extract from archaeological human remains. I mean, I think when I started, I thought, well, what are we going to be able to do? Age and sex, maybe estimate the height of the individual. individual, but we can map out so much pathology, and that's what I'm particularly interested in.

And the teeth, of course, I mean, you make your teeth when you're a child. So now we can unlock these secrets from teeth using chemical analyses, using isotope analyses, and get a fairly decent idea of where somebody grew up as a child. So, yeah, I think it's incredible that you've got that essentially document written in bone. And then, of course, what's wonderful about many burials is that they don't just contain the human remains, they contain objects. And those objects are in a context which I just don't think we see anywhere else in archaeology. So obviously we find objects on settlement sites and sometimes we find them completely isolated in hordes, you know, where there's no context at all and you've just got a bunch of objects

buried in a field. But in a burial, you've got objects which are meaningfully associated with an individual. And I think that's completely fascinating. So you start to see things like details of, you know, where brooches might be in the grave. And the brooches themselves, for instance, I'm thinking about those beautiful Anglo-Saxon creciform brooches. And they might be gorgeous objects in their own right, really interesting in terms of the styles and the way that you can map style three times

as Toby Martin's done so brilliantly with those brooches. But also, the position of them relative to the skeleton, gives you an indication of what that person was wearing. I mean, that's just astonishing that, you know, you can talk to my lovely friend Hugh Wilmot, who has excavated a lot of Anglo-Saxon burials, and I talk about his Scremby site in the book. And he talks about this really interesting perspective where I think in the past, people have said, oh, there's a lot of brooches in this grave that might have been a very high-status individual.

And he says, no, hang on a minute. We know what these brooches are doing. They're fastening clothes. So if an individual has got two brooches on the shoulders and she was probably wearing a peat-closs dress, but then she's got, you know, another brooch lying over her chest. She's probably being buried with not only in her dress, but also a cloak. And maybe we find that people who are buried in winter have more brooches with them than people who are buried in summer.

And I just think that's absolutely fascinating. But yeah, you've got that intimate association of objects with person, either objects which are personal belongings or things which people have thought it's important to place this object in the grave with that person. So that connection between an individual and an object, I think, think is so precious. Absolutely. I love that idea of different seasons. We don't really think about that at all, too, we just did them all as the same. That's great. Now, in thinking of the medieval period more specifically, does that stand out, do you think, in any way at all, in terms of what we can

tell from the dead? I think it stands out in terms of objects, actually, because we have a good few centuries in the middle of the first millennium where the general custom in Britain was to bury people and it's, you know, it is burial, it's inhumation rather than cremation. So we get a lot of information from the skeletons. I mean, you can get some information from cremations, but it's a bit limited. And then there is this tradition of obviously burying people fully closed and with other objects as well, which tell us something about identity. So it is very rich in that regard.

And then, of course, towards the end of that first millennium, unfortunately, that custom disappears and we just have people buried. We presume, you know, with no clothes on, wrapped in a shrew. shroud and perhaps in a coffin as well, but you'd just, you'd use the objects. So I think we do have this kind of quite exciting period for burial archaeology in the middle of the first millennium. When you have all that stuff, you have all these artefacts, I think it's wonderful. And of course another thing that happens in this period is the birth of churchyards, and you write about that in the book as well. What impact does that have on our understanding of the period?

They're really fascinating. And this is something, you know, I'm not a historian, so a quite, enjoyed writing this book as well in terms of, you know, starting with the biological anthropology, starting with the skeletons, but then putting them in context and broadening out that context and looking at the history. And I suppose I hadn't really thought about the way that Christianity spread in Britain in any great detail before. And it's a very different story in the West compared to the East. So in the East, there seems to be either a reversion to pagan religions. I don't like the term pagan. I don't know what else to call them. But it's basically a derogatory term, isn't it? You know, the religions of the countryside are the heathens,

you know, out in the heath, out in the countryside, what they believe. Those uncivilised people. Anyway, there seems to have been a reversion to pagan belief in the South East. I mean, we don't know what's happening across much of Britain, of course, the historical evidence to say patchy. But we presume that was happening in the South East because then, of course, the church finds the need to send people over to sort out the Anglo-Saxons like St. Augustine. But in the West it's very different because we have very, very early evidence of Christianity, especially in West Wales. And so there's something different going on there.

And I think it might be strong links with what is now France and strong links with essentially with what is left to the Roman Empire because Christianity is just the Roman Empire continuing but as a kind of religious empire. And so those early churchyards, you know, some of the like fifth century and then sixth, seventh century in West Wales, I think are really fascinating. And the other thing is, of course, we all think that you find skeletons and churchards, but churchards are a new thing in the first millennium. People haven't had churchards before that. Well, first of all, there haven't been any churches.

But also, even when you've got Christianity beginning, there's not necessarily an association between where you bury people and a church. Despite what we're all familiar with in the, particularly the English and Welsh landscape today, it's a bit different, of course, when you get into Scotland and into Ireland, where often cemeteries are separate from settlements. And that's the kind of change that we see happening. So we see cemeteries which are outside settlements, changing over time to be associated with churches and then eventually coming into settlements. Whereas if you go back into the Roman period, in Roman law, in the 12 tables of Roman law,

it says you do not bury people inside the town boundary, inside the town walls. So it's a very different idea of what we do with the dead when we start to have churches inside settlements and churchyards around those churches. is. Yeah, absolutely. And that is such an interesting point. And I think it's interesting also what that means for what we can get out of the bones and the burials in terms of how we associate them with a site and with a village and, you know, settlement and so many things to untangle.

And yeah, and you go in through some of these. Well, but too many spoilers in there, people have to get a book and read the rest. But what I did want to do is go through some of the examples and some of the sort of case studies and examples that you talk about in the book. And what I really loved about buried is actually the way that you also talk about your own experience and your own association with a lot of these sites. You've been very fortunate, I think, in your career to have been able to see so many different places and actually been involved with them. And the first few chapters you do talk about the Romans. I know this is a medieval podcast and we're going to sort of skip over the Romans a little bit. We'll go back to a few of them later.

Oh, the wonderful Kalean pipe burial. Oh, yeah. I know, but we could talk about that all that. You'll have to come on one of our other podcasts and talk about that one. All right. We'll go to the medieval period. But so the one I wanted to talk to you about is the site at Bremor in Hampshire. Yeah.

Which is a brilliant site. And you were involved in this quite early on. And I think, am I right in saying that this was one of your first time team episodes that you were part of back in the day? It was the first. It was the absolutely first one that I did. Yeah, so I'd been writing bone reports for them. You know, as you know, get the boxes of bones delivered to a lab. And I've been laying out the skeletons writing reports to them on sites that they'd excavated.

Because Time Team operated like any archaeological unit. It was producing a television program, but also it had to actually produce a report on each of the sites. Of course, they did excavate. And that involved the fieldwork, but also obviously reports from experts as well. say pottery experts, coin experts and bone experts. And they had a bit of a backlog of bones to look at. So I kind of got involved in the late 90s, I think. And then, so I'd been doing that for a bit.

And then they said, actually, we've got this site where we'd love you to come along. And I said, are you, well, you know, are you sure you're going to have bones? Because I'm going to have to move some teaching around on a full-time academic at the time. Are you sure there are going to be bones there? And they said, well, it is a cemetery site. Yeah, quite likely. All right, then. Okay.

So I went along and it was absolutely fascinating. and it had been discovered by a metal detectorist Steve Bulger who had been metal detecting in this field and discovered the most beautiful object. I mean, it's absolutely stunningly beautiful, this Byzantine bucket that has come all the way from Antioch in what's now Turkey. I mean, it's just gorgeous,

and it's made of brass, and we think it would have been silvered with tin, and it's got pictures of heroes battling beasts, which are possibly leopards, and it's got a little Greek inscription on the top. It's just an absolutely beautiful object. And then what we found over the course of the excavation there was lots more buckets, none quite as beautiful as that original one actually. But there was a real thing for buckets.

And again, it's an Anglo-Saxon cemetery. So it was, yeah, it was absolutely fascinating. And it was interesting writing the book because it made me go back and look at it all again. And remember the mystery. So we came away from Brammer with lots of questions. And some of the questions were, why were there so many buckets. I don't think we'll ever get to the bottom of that. There are other sites that have buckets in them, but none at quite the density that we found.

We think they're high-status objects. They may have been used to contain food or drink as some kind of offering in the grave, perhaps. But what actually had been worrying me, I suppose, the last 20 years, was why so many of the burials were multiple. So there were a few double and then even a triple burial with two young men and a child buried between these two men. and you just think what is going on in this community and they're very definite you know when you're digging obviously you're looking really carefully at whether you've just got graves that happen to be close together because it was difficult to see the grave cuts at that site I remember that it was very very difficult to see the soil inside the grave and outside the grave which some you know in some sites you can see so clearly but in this one you couldn't. So then we're thinking, well, maybe you've just got graves that have buried very close together. So they end up looking like multiple graves.

But then clearly not because some of the individuals were intertwined with each other. You know, an arm would be over another skeleton. So we were absolutely sure that these were genuine multiple burials. Then you start thinking about why, and you think that something catastrophic must have happened here to have so many multiple burials. So presumably you're either looking at some dreadful disease which has ripped through that community,

or you're looking at conflict. Now the bones are really crumbly, and that's frustrating, because obviously we can look carefully at the skeletons and look for signs of violent injury on the skeletons, but they were extremely crumbly. All of them, actually, apart from those two male individuals with the child, and they were much better preserved,

and there were no signs, I couldn't see any signs of violent injury on the bones. So, you know, could it be a disease, And then, of course, the interesting thing about diseases is that most of the diseases that kill you do so quickly and don't leave a mark on your skeleton. And so people like you and I, Cat, are left in the dark. And, you know, we can be presented with what looks like a perfectly healthy skeleton, which is obviously, you know, of a dead person. Yeah. And we don't know why they died. Yeah.

And then very rarely we have these diseases which people live with. And then those leave signs in the skeleton. So the bone has had time to react to that disease. And some of them are really absolutely characteristic, say things like leprosy and syphilis, which leave these kind of very definite signs in the skeleton. And then you have kind of non-specific infections where we would just say, oh, well, the bone is infected. There's maybe osteomyelitis with the bone and the marrow infected, but we don't know what caused it. We could suggest a range of bacteria, which might be the culprits, but we don't actually know.

And then, of course, our geneticist friends come along and go, hello. We can take samples of this bone and we can decode not only the human DNA in it, but the pathogen DNA as well. So using the same techniques that we've been using to track the evolution of COVID through the pandemic, they're able to extract these samples of bone, boost the amount of DNA that they've got using PCR, which just amplifies the DNA, and then sequence it. And it's just astonishing. And the way that that's come on in the last 20 years, I mean, when we dug Bremer in 2001, this wasn't even on the first. horizon. I don't think it even occurred to me that at some point in the future we might be able to

sample for pathogen DNA. And so, so now, I'm like, where are the bones? Where have they ended up? Because I know they were in my lab at some point. Did they go into the archive at Bristol University? Did they go back to the local museum, which is where they should have gone? And I'm very pleased to say they did go back to the local museum. So we tracked them down. And together with my friends at the Crick Institute, so Pontus Scogland is heading up a fantastic project. And called the Thousand Ancient Genomes Project. And in his lab, Pugia Swali is doing the metagenomics. So she is focusing on the metaginomes, the genomes of the pathogens.

I said to Pugia, what am I at this site? And she said, yeah, okay, we'll have a look. So they've sampled them. And I spoke to Pugia last week. And no, it's all bad news. I was going to say the good news. It's all bad news. They're so crumbly.

They are so crumbly. And I think when you've got crumbly skeletons like that, you kind of know that it's very unlikely to be any surviving DNA. So at the moment we don't know. Because when I was looking at those bramip skeletons again, looking at all the photos from the dig, I was reading a paper that was published, I think, in 2019, looking at a site that had been dug in the 1980s in Cambridgeshire called Edicts Hill. And it was so similar. Lots of multiple burials, still with plenty of grave goods. That was interesting. So they're not hurried burials, but they are multiple burials.

And that site had been investigated in a big study looking at the plague in Europe and turned up evidence of Yersinia pestis, the plague pathogen. And it's the first time that we've seen sixth century plague in Britain. And we know what it is because it's well attested. It's the Justinianic plague that rips through the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire. so we've got historical reference to it but not in Britain and now we're able to extend that with our fantastic new archaeological sciences and say yes this plague did reach Britain

and the authors of that paper actually said given that we've only looked at this one site and we found it it's very likely that this was widespread and not that we just seem to have hit upon the one area where it did take hold so I was just really fascinated because Bremer's a similar age it's 6th century so it's a bit disappointing But Pooge has got one last trick up her sleeve, which is to actually go fishing for Yersinia pestis DNA. So rather than sequence it and then look amongst the sample to see if there's any there,

and it might be like looking for a needle in the haystack. They can use DNA probes. So a bit of DNA which will go and stick specifically to Yusinopestis and see if they can pull any out that way. So she's got one last trick up a sleeve, and I'm just tenter hooks waiting to hear whether that's the case. Fingers cross. I mean, that is so exciting. And this is so new. I mean, one of my questions on my list a bit later on here and my little plan for this conversation is, you know, what is there in the future and, you know, what is there to be excited about? But I think this just demonstrates that point so well, doesn't it? That there's so many new technologies now that are just refining all the time. And just going back, as you say, 20 years ago. So I should just sort of admit here that you were at Bristol University and so was I, but I was a little baby undergrad and you were actually one of my tutors. the human osteology course teaching me this sort of thing. But, you know, this wasn't even really a thing then, you know, and that's not actually that long ago. So I think that the leaps that we've come forward in this are just extraordinary. And presumably that is what is exciting.

So even though, even if you're disappointed with those results now, it may well be then another 10 or 20 years, they could do it again, I suppose. Is that not what's quite exciting right now? It is exciting. And also, you know, they are managing to get DNA out of bone more and more effectively. So yeah, I think that things will move on. There will always be, though, some cases where there just isn't anything there to look at. But, you know, I'm holding out hope for Brammer. But as you say, it's such, I mean, it's such an exciting time at the moment with ancient DNA. I think it's equivalent to, I don't think I'm over-egging it. I think it's equivalent to when radiometric dating came along for archaeology. And you have this kind of

revolution where suddenly you could do radiocarbon dating and actually pin a date on something, not just a relative date according to the style of objects or where it was in the ground, but actually say, you know, how old is this, as long as it has some kind of organic component to it? And I think that this ancient DNA is, I think it is a revolution in archaeology. I think it's completely changing things. And I wrote a little bit in the previous book Ancestors about how there was a bit of a culture clash when these two worlds came together when you had kind of the world of genetics and these scientists kind of wading in to archaeological debates

and sometimes early on publishing stuff without actually talking to archaeologists, which not only put the archaeologist back to them, and I think that's perfectly reasonable, it also meant that they perhaps didn't understand the questions that the archaeologists were asking and also didn't understand the, I suppose, the history of that inquiry. And I do think you do need a bit of that. But I think that both sides can learn from each other, And I think we're managing to negotiate that culture clash much better in Britain, actually,

than perhaps in the States initially, although I do think it's calming down now. And you've got people, you know, in Pontus's lab, Tom Booth, is an archaeologist and a geneticist. And Tori King, who did the sequencing on Richard III, again, is an archaeologist and a geneticist. So I think that, you know, hopefully we'll be able to make the most of this new development and this new technique and this new science. couldn't agree more and I think it is really exciting we do have to be careful because we do still get some conflicts like that but I think it's also a really exciting time where we can take those new data sets that we get

and combine them with the old traditional archaeology and so things like I get excited about family relationships in the Viking Age we get a lot of now direct family relationships and then you can combine that with isotopes and contact and suddenly you've got this you know it's a huge new world has opened up really I think with what we can tell so yeah it's so exciting Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent?

Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon without the bra? You can expect answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from history hit, patented history of inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to patented history of inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. But I need to get back on track, Chris. I want to ask you some more probing questions about some of these sites that you've written about here.

I feel like we could just talk all day. So on this particular site, you just mentioned these graves and these double graves. And the one thing that you wrote about is the fact that these have a lot of weapons. You've talked about the possibility of there being a battle and so on. And you talk quite a lot in the book about the potential for these being warriors, that they are described often as warrior graves because they have a lot of weapons. And this is something that we come across quite a lot in Anglo-Saxon archaeology and also Viking Age archaeology.

Is someone buried with a weapon, a warrior? You talk about it really nicely in the book. But the one thing I wanted to ask you about is in terms of injuries and trauma, You mentioned this a little bit already that there wasn't really a lot of evidence of how these people died where you were going down the disease path. But in terms of warrior graves, possible warrior graves and trauma like that, if we have battle deads, if we have people who were warriors and who have died, how often and how likely is it that we see evidence of that death or that trauma in the skeleton?

Is it sort of certain? Do we always see it if somebody's died in battle? or is it a bit more murky than that? I think it's very murky, and it's really tricky, and it's kind of frustratingly tricky, because obviously what you don't have is any soft tissue, that you are just looking at the bone. And I think one of the exciting things about biological anthropology

is what you can draw out a lot of information from the skeleton. But it's very, very rare to be able to determine cause of death. You know, it's really, really tricky. Even if you've got a horrendous case of osteomyelitis, for instance, which you think, well, that could easily have turned into sepsis, that could easily have been the thing which killed that person. They could have been beheaded. You know, they could have been, you probably would have noticed that in the grave,

but they could have died in so many different ways. And there's only a couple of kind of signs in the skeleton where you're pretty much sure that that's exactly what the person died of. And it's things like the hangman's fracture, where the prong at the top of the spine on the second cervical vertebra has broken, which, you know, happens in a hanging. And you know, that clearly is hanging. There's a whole bit in the, I know it's straying back into the Roman period cat,

but I do actually talk about the medieval kind of description of some of these burials. There's a whole chapter on decapitated burials with interesting discussions about, could some of these decapitated burials be decapitated post-mortem to stop zombies, basically. And Simon Mays, who's the osteologist of Historic England, has done quite lot of work on this subject, looking at medieval records of revenants, which are absolutely fascinating and all these bishops saying, yeah, dig them up, cut the heads off with a spade.

Yeah, that's what you do. And then it came back to the Roman burials and gave, because there was a real peak in the late Roman period of people being decapitated in graves. And then you suddenly realize it's very complicated. Some of them are probably executions. Some of them are probably people being beheaded in battle. Some of them may be a ritual.

It looks like some heads have been detached, quite carefully, which I don't think is either violent death or, you know, cutting the head off a corpse with a spade to stop a zombie coming back. So it may be a kind of strange ritual that we just don't really have any documentary evidence of. But I suppose I'm bringing up that because in those cases where you see a head in a different place in a grave, your immediate reaction is often, well, this person was beheaded. Clearly that was the cause of death. And it's not as simple as that. So you had to look really, really, really carefully at the skeletons. And it wasn't. you see a carefully detached head, and especially a head that's been carefully detached from the

front, I think that's very unlikely to be the cause of death. I think that's, you know, almost inevitably something which has happened to that body after death. So it's, no, it is frustrating not to be able to see. What we can do is look at a population level. And I think that it's interesting to look at diseases case by case. And we get a fascinating insight into an individual and what they were suffering from. But when we broaden out to a population level and look at population level, statistics, epidemiology, then we learn more about how diseases spread and evolve through time. And then you can also take a kind of epidemiological approach to violence as well. So you can gather all the information together and say, does this period of time

look like a more violent period of time rather than just relying on one cemetery? I think that's where the real value comes in. I don't think there's been enough work in that kind of area, actually. That kind of almost like a big data approach to it. And I'll just. geneticist friends are basically leading the way in that. What they do is often a big data approach where they're trying to look at population movements through time. But I think we should be doing the same thing with pathology. Absolutely.

And this has come up actually recently in my own work in looking at the Viking Age and thinking about violence in the Viking Age, which we all assume is this sort of hugely violent period of time. Well, of course they were just brutes, weren't they, Kat? They were just, you know, absolutely rampant brutes, you know, really uncultured, uncivilised, just going around chopping up people. Completely unlike the peaceful Anglo-Saxons who just sat there and took it all.

The lovely Anglo-Saxons, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. The lovely Christian Anglo-Saxons and the naughty pagan Vikings as well. Precisely, exactly. It's all of this baggage, isn't there? Certainly what Alfred the Great and his publicist would have us. Interesting, just what you were saying there,

looking at the evidence for violence. And actually, if you look at what's available at the moment across the Viking world, if you look at before, the Viking age during and after, there isn't more violent trauma injury in skeletons in the Viking Age than there is. In fact, I think the later period just after the Viking Age has more trauma than the Viking Age. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah. You know, you start to think, do we have to question this? We have to look at that bigger picture. Absolutely. Just like you say. It's really important, isn't it? Because it enables us to go back and look at things like,

I mean, I think that when I really like Gildas's The Ruin of Britain, the history was so alluring. And, you know, you read his ruin of Britain and it's just so exciting. I mean, it's basically a polemic. It's like a fire and brimstone sermon all about these Anglo-Saxons arriving, the early Anglo-Saxons who are pagan, so they're bad. And they sweep through the country and then they dip their fiery tongue in the water in the West. And you go, God, you know, they must have been surging through the country and chopping everybody up. And then actually when you look at the archaeology, it just doesn't seem to reflect that at all.

And I think that, you know, we have so few historical sources for that period. And so they've gained kind of undue prominence and been thought of as the last word almost on what was actually happening. And so the archaeology is so important because it does actually give us a much wider picture, as you say, and just allows us to say, well, hang on a minute, was there an uptick in violence at this point in time or not? We should move on to that a little bit actually because you do in the last chapter of your book that you've called belonging actually and talking about these ideas of identity and especially what happens in that post-Roman period into this coming and arrival on the Anglo-Saxons and how this is all interlinked and related which is such a hugely brilliant chapter and so so interesting.

Where are we now in terms of that in terms of what archaeology and new methods like isotope analysis or DNA? how that's contributing. What's the sort of current status quo, I suppose, on that topic now? I think this is a fascinating question. I think there's two answers to this, because I think one answer is about the approach that archaeology is taking now, and then another answer is what's the detail of the findings of what's happening in that first millennium.

And one of the big questions, and I've kind of unashamedly focused on, you know, the southern half of Britain, I suppose, in this. The north is really fascinating as well, and I do talk about that a bit in the chapter on Anglesea and talking about the Vikings and the Kingdom of the Isles in the north and that kind of fascinating connection with Scandinavia. But this burning question of whether there's a big influx of people in the first millennium

and not just in the first millennium, but in that post, specifically in that post-Roman period, the periods we used to call the Dark Ages, which sometimes Nautly I still do call the Dark Ages because my historian friends get very, very irate about this because they've completely issued that old term and they think it's very derogatory and that people were doing lovely craft and things like that. But we don't have much history. So it's dark in terms of, you know, what we have written down, I think. And it's also dark in terms of learning. And the historians will say, oh, you know, but there was some learning going on and it was, you know, the church was doing a good job in preserving things, but it was also doing a really good job in getting rid of a lot of classical

material, actually. That's another, you know, that's a whole other area of discussion. But I think that this, this question of, is there a big influx of people into southern Britain that could be this kind of arrival of the Anglo-Saxons? You know, the venerable bead writes about the Adventist Saxonum, the arrival of the Saxons, the arrival of the, he divides them up, you know, the angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, who he says come from different homelands in, you know, Germanic places in Scandinavia, and come and settle in very specific places in Britain. And it's all very neat, strangely neat, when you look into it. He barely mentions the Friesians, who were surely more important than it seems when we talk about these people coming over.

Also, you never talk about people going back the other way. There must be people going the other way as well. So what genetics allows us to do is to say, well, you know, come on, is there a big influx of people? Because obviously what we can do with genomes is to look at people's genomes and say, are they substantially different than the genomes of the people who were there a few generations before in the preceding centuries? They are the people who are in England in their 5th, 6th, 7th centuries. Do they seem to be coming from somewhere else? Or are they the descendants of the people who were there in the Roman period? And I think it's much more complicated than we've previously thought. I think we probably haven't thought enough about how much movement there was in the Roman period.

I mean, for God's sake, we're part of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was just brilliant at moving people around, all over the place. slaves, soldiers, merchants, and then, you know, loads of people who were just travelling for the sake of it. So I don't feel that we've got a good handle on whether there is more. I mean, it's a bit like you're talking about, is there an increase in violence during the Viking Age? Is there an increase in population movement during the middle centuries of the first millennium? And I don't think we're there yet, but I'm very, very optimistic that Pontus and his team are going to provide us with at least part of the answer very soon. Certainly what we're seeing at the moment. I mean, there's been some work done, you know, limited number of genomes sequence so far, looking at Anglo-Saxon cemetery sites and trying to pick up.

It's very tricky if we're talking about people moving within northwest Europe. You know, if it was people coming from East Asia, easy. The genomes are quite different. Or I say quite different. Obviously, our genomes are largely the same. But, you know, there will be particular genetic variants, which are more frequent in East Asia and you'll be able to see people coming in. if you're talking about people coming over the North Sea,

I mean, for goodness sake, the North Sea has been a corridor for movement back into prehistory. So people have always been swapping genes across the North Sea, moving to and fro and settling on the other side of the sea. So it's going to be difficult, and it's going to rely on really interesting techniques, like looking for quite rare variants, which happened to be more common in Scandinavia, for instance,

and then seeing if you see those popping up in England. And we've got some studies which have shown, that, but what they haven't done is shown whether those rare variants are coming over in the mid-first millennium or whether they're arriving in the Roman period. And you've got lots of auxiliary soldiers who we know are coming from places across the North Sea. So yeah, at the moment we don't know. We're just starting to widen and unpick that. So that's the detail of it. I think the approach, you know, archaeology, I think is fascinating because when I started engaging with archaeology coming from a medical background, what I found

really interesting about it was the philosophy, which is very embedded in it. You know, you can't do archaeology as an undergraduate in Britain without doing the philosophy and history of archaeology, which I think is really important because it feeds into how we're framing our questions today. And however objective you try to be, you're always subjective and you're always bringing some of that baggage with you. So it's really important to kind of know that. history. And that was something for me, you know, coming from medicine, we didn't do that. I took a unit as a kind of special module looking at philosophy of medicine. It wasn't something that was embedded in the course at all. There wasn't that kind of introspection, which I think is

really useful and mature in a discipline. And so archaeology is very aware of how it's changed in its approaches over the 20th century into the 21st century. And I think what we're seeing now is much more of what I would call a kind of bottom-up approach rather than a top-down one. So I think we're seeing much more of an approach where you go, okay, we've got this question in mind, but let's just look at all of the evidence in front of us and see what patterns are there.

It's interesting, isn't it? I mean, it is to an extent hypothesis-driven, but it's not always hypothesis-driven. And I don't think that matters. You're kind of looking to see what the patterns are and then interpreting them. So you're not kind of approaching it with an expectation of what those patterns are going to be.

And you're also not asking binary questions. I think that's really important. So you're not just saying, is their movement, isn't their movement. That's not the question. In fact, you know, there is inevitably going to be population movement. You're asking what is the nature of this movement and it's much more detailed. So I think there's two things going on. One thing is that we're getting closer to understanding whether Bede is actually telling us something

which is reasonable historically or, you know, whether he is himself. coming up with a narrative which fits what he sees in Britain and kind of explains the cultural differences in Britain. Is he doing that? Or is there kind of some historical underpinning to what he tells us about the arrival of these people? That that's there on the one hand. And then on the other hand, I do think that archaeology is changing. And perhaps, I don't know, perhaps it is changing

because of the archaeological sciences that are coming on board now. I don't know what you feel about that. Because, I mean, that's your whole approach to the Viking era, has been to embrace these new scientific approaches and to see how they feed in. Do you think that's changing archaeology? I think it's absolutely changing it because I think it's forcing us to be much more careful with what questions we're asking and with using those other sources because suddenly we have a sort of check. I mean, I've always sort of tried to make it really clear that the sciences aren't going to give us all those answers.

It's not a silver bullet. We're not just going to send up a sample and then solve the whole. Anglo-Saxon migration or solve the Viking Age that's never going to happen you know we need that interpretation but it's just giving us that extra sort of category of evidence

and set of data that's forcing us to be really open-minded because sometimes it gives us completely the answer we were not expecting at all and that's exciting isn't it that's always exciting because first you go oh no but then you go oh but you know so when you suddenly find

someone in the Viking Age it comes from a climate like a really hot climate So if I come across someone in a grave in Repton, there's somebody there who clearly has come from a really warm climate. It's not, you know, I'm expecting the Baltic or somewhere freezing. And then suddenly, you know, maybe it's Spain or something like that. And then you have to sort of question all of those assumptions that you've made before. And I think having all those methods there just leaves that open.

And it leaves sort of open a whole new range of things to question. And I think it's making us much more aware that we can't just take the beads and the guilds and, you know, all of those. Yeah. Or, you know, the people we've learned from and the people, two or three generations of archaeologists before us, you know, we can't even take their word for sort of granted or for true. We have to, as you say, try and be even more objective because all of a sudden we have a whole new sort of set of data. So that's getting quite philosophical about it all. But I think it is changing it.

It's not giving us the answers on its own, but I think we are getting those big data sets. We're getting that shift in how we're thinking about it. and people are sort of communicating and listening across the discipline. So it is exciting and it's new and I think we will. I'm quite optimistic that we're going to get closer to some of those answers pretty soon. Yeah. And ask different questions as well. It's fascinating, isn't it?

Absolutely. And I think we have to work at those data sets. So look at the artefacts, look at the objects and the scientific data. And then, yeah, fingers crossed, we'll get there. Yeah. So I have a whole other page of questions that I want to do. ask you but I think that's going to take us into like a whole day's worth of our episode so that we could just chat forever couldn't we yeah we really could but I think we for the sake of our

listeners we probably haven't got all day I can only really tell people to go out and buy your book so the book is called buried an alternative history of the first millennium in Britain by professor Alice Roberts and if you're not a sort of die-hard medieval fan you could definitely go into those Roman sites at the beginning the their headless Romans and some really really is a great studies there. I had hoped to get the time to talk to you about the possible Vikings in a ditch, but I think we're going to leave them, sort of get people to go and read about them, because there's some really fascinating other cases there, and of course, a lot more about even some of the sites that appeared on digging for Britain, white sands in Pembrokeshire, for example, and other early

Christian possibly sites, cemetery sites that you talk about in the book as well. So I think that's all I can do, really, is get people to go and get the book and read for themselves. Yeah, and then, you know, if you've got questions, ask me on Twitter. Yes, do go and find Alice on Twitter and, yeah, just see what you think of the book, but I would definitely recommend it. So, Alice, thank you so, so much for taking the time to talk about all of this today. Kat, it's been wonderful talking to you, thank you. This has been today's episode.

I'm back again next Tuesday, and my co-host Matt Lewis is back on Saturday. but in the meantime if you do want more medieval content in your life don't forget you can subscribe to our newsletter medieval Mondays just look in the episode notes and you can find out how to do that and thank you all so much for listening I hope to have you back again with us soon