Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain

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It would perhaps have been better to read it off the page than listen to the audiobook, so that I could have gone back to check things more easily. But some scholars have argued that it simply relates to the original territory that Togidubnus could claim some hereditary right to rule – and that Tacitus is being cynical or condescending: Rome deigns to gift Togidubnus’s own kingdom back to him. Sitting at the intersection of art, science, and history, this week’s podcast reveals fresh perspectives and fascinating insights into our material world. Burial customs, how a body lies in a grave and what is put in with it, can indeed tell us a lot, but there is a tendency to interpret what one sees in the light of what one expected to find.

None of the Roman or early Anglo-Saxon burials we've paused to look at on this journey through the first millennium took place inside settlements (apart from those infant burials). The upper end of the pipe’, Wheeler wrote, ‘was found at a depth of about a foot beneath the present surface, but to this depth the soil was merely surface-mould, and there is no doubt that the pipe originally reached the open air.These are all super exciting ideas and very much my sort of thing, but I really struggled to follow the line of argument on several occasions, and found that the narrative often veered way off the point it was meant to illustrate. The book was enjoyably chugging along fairly well, with a couple blips of her personal politics and a barely hidden distain of religion, and then that let down at the very end in the Postscript. 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.

Vespasian – following military successes in Britain, and then in Judaea – had become emperor in 69 CE, with his eldest son, Titus, succeeding him in 79. I carried a box over to the table, then went to find a couple of large white trays and a pair of forceps. Finally in the Postscript she, after spending pages and pages talking about Anglo Saxons, talks dismissively about the term Anglo Saxons even continuing to being used (even while admitting to it being an ancient term) because of course, you guessed it . Roberts suggests a Hellenistic philosophical tradition using Epicureans to deduce a classical knowledge transference into North Sea paganism, Britonic paganism allowed by Romans (not so much the Druids themselves), and later Roman Xtianity.Only one other vaguely similar burial had ever been discovered in Britain – a lead coffin in Colchester, with a lead pipe sticking out of it.