"Crypt" by Alice Roberts

“Osteoarchaeology, paleopathology and now archaeogenomics are transforming our understanding of the past.” (Epilogue) In this fascinating and utterly readable book, Professor Alice Roberts shows how the study of ancient skeletons can mesh with the sequencing of DNA and, where available, historic documents to give us new insights into our human past.

This book is a sequel to Ancestors, which focused on BC, and Buried which considered the first millennium AD. This book studies burials from 1002 AD until 1545. But as well as learning about archaeology and history and bony anatomy, I also learned about how archaeologists can work out where a skeleton grew up from the balance of strontium and oxygen isotopes in the teeth, a great deal about leprosy - who knew you can catch it from an armadillo? - 

The first chapter analyses skeletons found in Oxford that appear to have been buried after being violently killed. Are they the bodies of people killed on Saint Brice's day (13th Nov) in 1002 after Ethelred the Unready called for a massacre of Danes? The second investigates the graveyard of a mediaeval leper hospital and asks whether leper hospitals originated in pre-Conquest England. Chapter 3 tells the story of the martyrdom of St Thomas a Becket and asks whether a skeleton discovered in 1888 could belong to him. Chapter 4 is surprised by a high incidence of Paget's Disease in a single churchyard. Chapter 5 traces, through osteoarchaeology, the prehistoric lineage of the bacterium responsible for the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death and Bubonic Plague. Chapter 6 considers bone deformities in the skeletons of those drowned when Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose sank and Chapter 7 asks whether syphilis found in the skeleton of a mediaeval anchoress can tell us whether the disease came to Europe from the New World in the wake of Columbus.

Seven fascinating stories. History, prehistory, science and even some maths, all told in an engaging style (with some very poor puns, see selected quotes). What's not to like?

Selected quotes:

• “It shows the potential for aDNA from fishbones - which everyone had previously thought would be dead in the water.” (Ch 1)
• “Archaeology explores the past from the ground up, not the top down.” (Ch 2)
• “Henry arranged to have his son, Henry Junior, crowned in preparation, so that he could immediately step into his father's clogs when he popped them.” (Ch 3)
• “Some diseases kill so quickly, there are no traces lift on bones.” (Ch 5)

July 2024; 298 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God