Prehistoric Graves: Why They Are Time Capsules Of Early Britain | HistoryExtra

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• what cutting-edge science can tell us about the ancient past

• the material objects of ancient cultures, remnants of constructions and buildings, and the remains of our own ancestors

• There’s an often forensic process that goes on when you’re trying to reconstruct what life was like in the prehistoric era,

• little microcosms of the culture of the time.

• As well as the objects we find in graves, we’re able to extract ever more information from the bones themselves. For me, as a biological anthropologist, it’s been astonishing how the science around this has developed over the past 20 to 30 years.

• You can’t ask it about symptoms

• but most prehistoric people actually had much better teeth than ours because they didn’t have such a starchy, sugary diet.

• By analysing his genome, geneticists have revealed that he probably had an unusual combination of dark skin and bright blue eyes. Being able to work that out from just a skeleton is utterly extraordinary.

• But it does provide important strands of new evidence with the potential to answer some big questions, especially about mobility and migration. We should view it more as a tool for archaeologists to use – one that will hopefully help us see the picture more clearly.

• You’ve been arguing about this for ages. Well, now we’ve got the answer.” Not surprisingly, archaeologists have responded: “Hang on a minute – first you need to learn a bit about archaeology and the kinds of questions we’re asking.”

• itt-Rivers was very influenced by 19th-century evolutionary theory and biology,

• For instance, Bronze Age people in Britain obviously had a different culture from the Neolithic people who preceded them. But where did they pick up this culture from? Pitt-Rivers suggested that there had effectively been a population replacement – that Bronze Age culture was actually brought in by a whole load of new people

• As a 19th-century antiquarian, he couldn’t stomach the idea that a man might be buried with jewellery.

• In the book, I talk about the need to avoid seeing discoveries through our own current cultural lens – to accept that there may have been many more diverse identities in the past than perhaps we understand today, for example