tamaranth | 2025/204: Crypt — Alice Roberts (Reply)

2025/204: Crypt — Alice Roberts

In politically tense times, differences – rather than similarities – can easily be brought into sharp focus. And such differences can be exploited by any politician who ultimately cares more about their own power, or indeed some abstract idea of nationhood, than about the lives of ordinary people and the ordinary communities that they govern. [loc. 317]

Following Ancestors (which examined several prehistoric burials) and Buried (ditto, but Roman and early medieval), Crypt explores the discovery, social context and archaeological significance of a number of burials that date to between 1000 AD and about 1500 AD. There's a mass grave in Oxford: not fighters, but likely settled Danes slaughtered as a result of Æthelred the Unready's 1002 edict that “all the Danes who had sprung up in this island are to be destroyed by a most just extermination". There's a medieval hospital where 85% of the skeletons excavated showed signs of leprosy. There's Thomas Beckett, assassinated at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral and later beatified. There is the Justinian Plague, which -- contrary to usual narratives -- does seem to have reached Britain; an anchorite with syphilis; the sailors on the Mary Rose; and a cluster of skeletons in a cemetery near Runcorn, showing signs of Paget's Disease -- a disease now on the wane.

Some of the chapters interested me more than others: the chapter on Beckett, for instance, focussed mostly on the history of the assassination and subsequent relgious controversy, as -- thanks to Henry VIII's destruction of Beckett's tomb and suppression of his cult -- there were no actual remains to examine. I was fascinated, though, by the ecology of M. leprae, the mycobacterium that causes leprosy: apparently it is completely unable to survive on its own, and can't even be grown in a laboratory. The descriptions of the damage it inflicted on sufferers were horrendous, but I am thankful that it's not more infectious. Happy news: 40% fewer new cases of leprosy in 2019 than in 2014!

I found the discussion of archaeogenetics really interesting: not only the detection and evolution of various pathogens, but also the new method for detecting biological sex: 'the amelogenin gene appears on both the X and Y chromosomes, in slightly different forms on each. DNA analysis focusing on the amelogenin gene has become a standard method for determining sex in forensic cases' [loc. 1085]. And I applaud the ways in which Roberts brings past lives to life.