#55: Ancestors

 

Ancestors by Alice Roberts

Seven burials

Ancestors is subtitled ‘The Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials’. In the book, Professor of the Public Engagement in Science at Birmingham University Alice Roberts uses burials, skeletons and their associated grave goods to talk about Britain and its populations, previous archaeologists’ practices, and current archaeological and cultural thought.

The Amesbury Archer, one of the skeletons Roberts chooses, was found with what looked like wrist guards and flint arrowheads around his body as well as pottery beakers which had been tipped onto their sides. There were also ‘decorated, delicate curls of gold’ which may have been earrings or hair wraps. The archer was 35-45 years old when he died and from the early Bronze Age — 2400-2100 BCE. This is the ‘richest Beaker burial’ in Europe, representing the man’s warrior status, and the grave goods are the earliest known pieces of metal in Britain. Roberts uses the Archer to discuss migration patterns, since he probably grew up in the Alps. 

Buried ponies

Another skeleton in the book is the Pocklington Chariot burial, from two or three centuries BCE. This has an intact chariot with the skeleton of the driver, ‘his body tucked into a crouched position to fit him in’. There are also upright ponies in the grave — headless, probably from a later ploughing of the earth. Roberts asks Iron Age expert Melanie Giles how the ponies got into the grave, upright. Giles replies:

‘Well, from what we can tell, they’re an old pair of ponies… So they’re a tried and trusted team. And maybe they trust their owners — enough to go down into the pit. I would guess they are encouraged to take that jump down into the grave pit, on their own, and then you get the chariot in, harness them up — and perhaps slit their throats as you back-fill rapidly around them.’

It is in parts like these that the book is best — careful recounting of detail together with a reasoned interpretation based on observation and analysis both of the site and of the skeletons. So we learn also that a sword and shield buried with an Iron Age skeleton in the Isles of Scilly were deliberately broken and that the grave contained a rare mirror. These objects, says Roberts: ‘could represent alliances; they could be gifts from mourners; they could be about old battles, won or lost; they could be about putting a version of the past to bed; they could be about imagining a future’. No escape from those ‘could bes’, just as Melanie Giles earlier had said ‘maybe’, ‘I would guess’ and ‘perhaps’. But this uncertainty opens a space for the imagination. A novelist could do a lot with such informed speculation about the ponies, the sword and the mirror.

The book also highlights the processes of archaeology — discovery, excavation, interpretation — and the activities of past archaeologists such as Henry Pitt Rivers, whose meticulous recording of the context of his discoveries were ahead of its time and who inferred population replacement movements from skull shapes, movements which Roberts hopes to confirm with DNA tests on the very skulls he collected.

The book starts and finishes with the Thousand Ancient Genomes Project, an attempt to use DNA sequencing of skeletons in archaeological remains to trace migration patterns to and from Britain, as well as ways in which diseases spread.

A bit scattered

The book is less successful in two main ways. Firstly, I would have liked a drawing together of the evidence from the disparate burials. A timeline and summary of what was found in each dig would be helpful, as would a map of the British Isles with each burial marked on it, and perhaps some kind of imaging of the islands’ main populations at each time. I could also imagine an infogram about how each burial confirmed or cast doubt on previous historical knowledge.

Archaeology and politics

Secondly, in my view Roberts is on shaky ground when she tries to hitch her archaeological wagon to current political preoccupations. For example, the bones of the charioteer mentioned above could not be identified as male or female and the grave contained both a sword and a mirror, traditionally associated with men and women respectively. ‘Perhaps’, says Roberts, such burials, and those of female charioteers, ‘could represent… a third gender. And then perhaps there was a fourth gender we haven’t even spotted; a fifth; a sixth’. 

I take Roberts’s point about not being too hasty with a binary judgement of sexes. However, it seems unlikely to me that Iron Age people were as preoccupied with gender fluidity as parts of twenty-first century society. During the book Roberts gives a great many warnings to the reader not to judge burials according to current views. But is this not what is happening here?

Opinions

The book is also punctuated by basic homilies on topics such as race and gender — some connected with archaeology, some not. She labels as ‘wrongheaded and futile’ the attempt to value a genetic connection to people from a particular place. She also says the idea of race ‘makes no sense biologically or historically’ and only racists believe in the idea. Well, my local council’s diversity unit sure believe that race exists, as do any number of media outlets and campaigning organisations. The book also contains a digression on the sexism of modern Roman Catholicism, which she describes as a ‘religious empire and system of political control’. I wondered if Roberts, vice-president of Humanists UK, was letting her opinions let rip in the way that cannot be done with a more cautious approach to physical evidence needed as an archaeologist.

Go see the Archer

But we can see the skeletons, and judge some of these issues for ourselves as far as possible. Roberts recommends a ‘pilgrimage’ to Salisbury Museum to see the Amesbury Archer. She describes him as ‘a metal-bending, bow-wielding, time-travelling magician’. This book would be, in parts, a good accompaniment to such a journey.