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Simon & Schuster

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FEW groups of people exert more power on English imagination than the Anglo-Saxons. They first appear in the historical record in the 1st millennium AD, in the wake of the Roman Empire’s retreat from Britain, and historians have seen them as playing a central role in the emergence of medieval English society. But were they a group who invaded Britain from mainland Europe? Or might there be another explanation hidden in the record?

Biological anthropologist Alice Roberts can’t fully answer this question in her engaging new book Buried, but it becomes clear this is for reasons beyond her control. She has become arguably the UK’s most famous archaeologist thanks to her extensive television work, and that experience shines through in her clear, richly detailed writing.

Buried is a loose sequel to last year’s Ancestors. In both, Roberts devotes each chapter to a grave, the people and artefacts found in it and what it might tell us about ancient British peoples. But where Ancestors focused on prehistoric burials, often many thousands of years old, Buried is about the 1st millennium AD: the period when the Roman conquest failed and Britain was then transformed.

Writing scientifically about graves and corpses is a challenge, but Roberts threads the needle beautifully. She is rigorous and sceptical, but never lets that stop her from empathising with the people concerned. That human kindness is essential, because some of the stories revealed by the burials are upsetting. Roberts even goes so far as to gently suggest that some readers might want to skip chapter two, which deals with the discovery of a baby’s bones in the grounds of what was once a Roman villa.

In the final chapter, Roberts knits her stories together into a larger narrative about the post-Roman period in Britain. Her central concern is the pervasive idea, taken from a few rather partial historical sources, that Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain from what is now Germany.

The evidence for a cultural shift is overwhelming, but such shifts can come about by means other than violent conquest. The alternative is that there were a number of cultural behaviours that emerged in Europe, which we now call Anglo-Saxon. These were then transmitted to Britain by word of mouth without the need for migration. History being messy, it could also, have been caused by a bit of both.

Roberts clearly had big plans on this front. She explains how she sent bone samples from the graves to the project, set up in 2019 by geneticist Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London. But when the covid-19 pandemic kicked off, the institute stopped all of its non-coronavirus work, so Roberts didn’t have the genetic data that would have put her ideas to the test.

Fortunately, even without the pay-off of the genetics, Buried more than earns its keep. Roberts’s nuanced discussions of the burials fuse a half-dozen scholarly fields without any sense of the narrative lurching: any switches between talk of bone shapes and early medieval manuscripts are handled deftly.

It reminded me of Oliver Sacks’s wonderful books describing neuropsychiatric conditions, which combine rigorous analysis of the underlying biology with a tender humanism and empathy. If anything, what Roberts is doing is harder because she can’t talk to the people about whom she writes.