This felt quite a long book, but I think it was because every page was packed with interesting and fascinating details.

It is absolutely astounding what we can find out from graves/burial sites of our forebears about who they were and how they lived.Did Togidubnus arrive back in Britain on the deck of one of the ships of the Claudian invasion fleet? The Romans reacted in a way that was completely typical of a colonising superpower – they weren’t about to give up either. But since the 1950s, archaeologists have added to the corpus of writing from Roman Britain, finding ephemeral pieces of text that have, quite astonishingly, survived the test of time – in the form of ink on thin wooden sheets, and scratched impressions of writing on the wooden casings of wax tablets. 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.

From Roman cremations and graveside feasts, to deviant burials with heads rearranged, from richly furnished Anglo-Saxon graves to the first Christian burial grounds in Wales, she sheds fresh light on how people really lived by examining the fascinating stories of the dead. 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. Silchester is another important administrative capital – which may have come under his control as well. Shortly after those excavations at Caerleon itself, some building work was happening on the southern side of the river, in the village still known at that point as Ultra Pontem (‘Over the Bridge’), turning up more evidence from Roman times. 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.It is not included in promotions available to our main range products, as stated in our terms of service. For example: in the chapter on Vikings, Roberts takes five pages to meander through some thoughts she's had about linguistic similarities between English and Scandinavian languages that strike her as too extreme to be explained by Viking raids. Archaeology is crucially important to understanding what was really happening in those shadowy centuries after Roman rule in Britain ended. From Roman cremations and graveside feasts, to deviant burials with heads rearranged, from richly furnished Anglo Saxon graves to the first Christian burial grounds in Wales, Buried provides an alternative history of the first millennium in Britain.

Buried tells the story of the first millennium in Britain from the perspective of funeral archaeology, showcasing the variety in burial practices and ideas about the afterlife present on the British Isles (though with a heavy bias towards England) from the Roman to the Norman Conquest. 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. Her story of unrelenting attachment to solving ancient burial mysteries is a superb, coherent narrative.Longevity and quality of life have improved on average, around the world, in the last century and a half.