There’s something about bones.
Maybe that sounds morbid, maybe it is morbid, but I don’t think I’m alone in the quiet fascination that settles in when a burial site is uncovered. When a skull is lifted from the soil. When archaeologists brush back the earth from a femur that last felt light 5,000 years ago.
I’m not an archaeologist. I’m not even studying archaeology (though sometimes I wish I were). I’m doing Classical Studies, all statues and epics and cities built on top of cities, but my heart has always had one foot in the dirt. I grew up watching Time Team and absolutely love Digging for Britain, glued to the screen whenever someone uncovered a brooch or an unexpectedly well-preserved bone. That early obsession never really left me.
And now, I’ve just finished reading Ancestors by Alice Roberts, a book that digs deep - quite literally - into the lives of people buried across prehistoric Britain. It’s full of graves. Full of bones. But it’s not a book about death, really. It’s about lives - and the stories that echo through time when we take the trouble to listen.
The Past Has a Body
It’s easy to think of history as a sequence of names and dates, a neat progression from one era to the next. But burials interrupt that linear flow. They make the past physical. Tangible. Suddenly, the Bronze Age isn't a term in a textbook - it's the curved line of a ribcage under glass, the grooves of a worn tooth, the scent of damp soil and peat.
There’s something profoundly human about that. Seeing a body, curled up in a grave, maybe clutching a bead or blade, reminds me that these people lived with the same raw edges we do: love, hunger, fear, grief. They just carried it in different clothes, with different gods.
Grave Goods and Good Stories
I think part of what draws me in is that I don’t have professional distance from this. I’m not reading these books for fieldwork or academic research - I’m reading because I’m genuinely fascinated by the act of reconstructing a life from a burial. I love the puzzle of it: not just what they left behind, but why. Was that amber bead sacred? Sentimental? Stolen?
There's imagination involved, but also deep care. The best books and documentaries on ancient remains - Ancestors, The Bog People, Kindred - don’t sensationalise the dead. They honour them. They ask: who were you? What mattered to you? Who mourned you?
Bones as a Bridge
I think I’m fascinated by burials because they sit at the meeting point of science and story. They give us hard evidence - the shape of a pelvis, the isotope traces in a tooth - and invite us to tell soft, human tales around it. They connect us with the unknowable, and in that, there’s both awe and comfort.
There’s something grounding, too, about realising that someday, I’ll be bones. That we all will. And maybe it won’t matter what I posted or how many books I owned - but maybe someone will find my bones and say: they lived. They left something behind.
And maybe that’s enough.
Further Reading
If this post sparked something in you, here are a few other books that delve into burial, ancestry, and the lives of the long-dead:
📖 Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
📖 The Bog People by P.V. Glob
📖 The Real Valkyrie by Nancy Marie Brown
📖 The Song of the Earth by Melanie Challenger
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icons2025-08-13 11:18 pm
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