What do human remains - and the objects buried with them - tell us about people’s lives in Britain in the first millennium, what they thought about mortality, how they felt about loss, and what they believed came next?

The anthropologist and author Professor Alice Roberts has been exploring the ways in which Ancient Britons bade farewell to their dead, examining sites of Roman cremations and graveside feasts, richly furnished Anglo Saxon graves and the first Christian burial grounds in Wales.

In this episode Cat chats to Prof. Roberts about how combining archaeological finds with cutting-edge DNA research and written history sheds fresh light on how the dead lived.

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Burials with Alice Roberts

Gone Medieval