The Amesbury Archer is preserved in Salisbury Museum and, according to Roberts, “our visits to museums, to gaze on such human remains, are a form of ancestor worship”. In her book, Roberts takes seven different prehistoric burials and explores who they may have been and what they reveal about their communities. It requires imagination, as well as scientific expertise, to read the “stories written in stone, pottery, metal and bone”.

But if we’re really going to understand our prehistoric ancestors, archaeology is where it’s at. ‘The physical remains of the ancestors themselves, and all of their amazing culture.’

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This book is best when it gets into the details of the burials themselves. Roberts gives us accessible explanations of the science behind the archaeological theories and talks through why the bones tell us what they do. So he was a member of the copper age super rich in Britain 4,000 years ago. Alice Roberts then does a great job of explaining what all of these objects mean for this period of prehistory - and what his skeleton reveals about the man. In summary, I was disappointed. I read Ancestors in the hope of learning more about prehistoric Britons. In the event, I mostly learned about British archaeologists, who are, in broad outline, pretty similar to American molecular biologists or German physicists, or academics anywhere. Then a new branch of science comes along, with some seriously disruptive technology, and says: we may be able to provide an Answer to this Question. The priests of Archaeology stroke their beards (some of them really do have beards, even quite long ones – while many don’t) and express doubts as to whether a geneticist could even begin to understand the Question. But the geneticists go ahead and drill the bones, extract the ancient DNA, retreat to their labs, do some fancy statistics, and – like some kind of alchemist cooking up a dull lump of lead into gold – they come up with an Answer. They present it to the priests: ‘We think this is what you’ve been looking for.’ But the priests narrow their eyes, sigh and fold their hands in their laps. It's just Fools Gold', they say, "Iron pyrites. You can make fire with it. But it is not the Answer. It isn't the Answer because it doesn't agree with the sacred texts of Post-Processualism"." Actually, the burials themselves are rather pre-history of Britain, but as the story of each burial includes the history of its initial discovery and of its further investigation, the "history" in the title is not irrelevant as many of these burials had been known since nineteenth century. In a way, this book is also the history of archaeology in seven burials. One of its main topics is DNA analysis -- the new insights into prehistory that it provides as well as its limitations.

Some readers might find this book with its constant talk about burials and bones too macabre for their taste, but I quite enjoyed it, including the overview of British burial practices from ancient to modern times. After all, paleontology and prehistory is very much about bones and burials. Besides, death doesn't disappear if we don't mention it--at least, I'm long past this pleasant illusion. Burial 1: The Red Lady (who is actually a man), buried some 34,000 years ago in Wales and the earliest modern human skeleton in Britain

There’s a Greek called Pytheas who sailed up past Britain, which he calls Britannica -the first recorded use of the word - who gives us a bit of a glimpse. This is in the 4th Century BCE. He says he sails even further north and gets to somewhere the sun never sets.’ THE FUNNY THING IS, as inaccessible as prehistoric peoples might seem today, their culture still defines our landscape. In hillforts; in long barrows. You know,’ Alice Roberts says, ‘we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of years of human history – all around the world… What we really see, when we start looking properly, is the incredible diversity of those cultures, through time and through space.’

I like to see hillforts as Iron Age castles; but also maybe places where animals were overwintered. Some have hut circles so we know there were people living in them. You get this impression that those Iron Age people didn’t just go for the first hill – they had a look around and went: This is the one with the view.’ An audio-version of this book has been sitting in my audible app library for a while now: prehistory, ancient burials, bones, paleontology -- of course, I had to buy it. I finally got to it on the verge of a trip to Britain -- after all, what could be a better suited pre-travel read than a history of Britain in seven burials.;) Burial 7: In the modern day - the cremated remains of the pioneer archaeologist Pitt Rivers, from the year 1900. She gets down to some juicy evidence as well. Gnawed human bones made by human teeth and cutmarks indicating cannibalism in the caves at Cheddar Gorge. Did our Neanderthal friends bury their dead? Are the Beaker people invaders? Chariot burials during Iron Age times. Intriguing stuff.Because the chemical signatures in food and water are different in different locations, archaeologists can make informed guesses about whether the skeletons that they find grew up locally or not - by analysing their teeth enamel. It took but a small step to name this skeleton the Red Lady, or – as he romantically preferred – the Witch of Paviland. She might even, he delicately alludes, have been a prostitute, owing to the location of a Roman camp nearby.

And so it goes. Roberts takes us through her seven burials, using them to describe two centuries of British archaeology, its advances and controversies. She does occasionally touch on human prehistory -- this typically happens when she quotes some actual archaeologist whom she interviewed. ( Roberts, it should be said, is at this point in her career more of a television personality than a practicing archaeologist. Nothing wrong with that, especially as she knows her stuff, especially when it comes to bones.) It is completely clear that the archaeologists Roberts talked to are much more interested in human prehistory than in archaeologistology. Without being too territorial about it, if you live in a certain place and you go out for walks, you’re communing with the ancestors. Of course this chap is just one of the seven burials we are promised by the title! The full list is: Other remarkable insights that Roberts gleans from the bones are: a bigger than normal bone nodule on the top of his shoulder implies a well developed bowstring drawing muscle. Subtle clues in the finger bones point to an iron grip. And a missing left kneecap means he probably walked with a limp.

A popular archeology book about bones found in the ground and what they tell us, using old and new techniques, about the people who’ve inhabited Britain from the Stone Ages onwards. Finally the book seems very up to date, reporting on excavations in the last few years and some still underway. For example I really enjoyed reading about two excavations from 2011 and 2017 where Neolithic long barrows, much to everyone’s surprise, were discovered to be the burial places of deliberately burned great halls, which were only later turned into the more familiar stone lined bone chambers hundreds of years later. The writing style Those Neolithic burials are about making a statement in the landscape. They’re about territory; about saying: This is ours; this has always been ours. This is where our family has been for many generations, and this is our family tomb. One of the best books I've read this year. After reading Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes's book about Neanderthals, this seemed a.logical follow on as it is about the early people who inhabited Britain. Not the very first, but those H. Sapiens folk who came to live here after the last Ice Age. She covers the period from the earliest known H. Sapiens remains through the mesolithic, neolithic, bronze age and iron age, stopping just before the Roman invasion.