Of course this chap is just one of the seven burials we are promised by the title! The full list is: Maybe if they’d been excavated 150 years ago, archaeologists would have been saying: This is definitely a man; must have been a chieftain.’ Indeed the grave itself contained nearly a hundred items – including copper knives, gold objects, boars’ tusks and a shale ring – making it the most richly furnished grave from the period that had ever been discovered in Britain. The grave goods and the broken remains of five distinctive pottery beakers with a characteristic upside-down bell shape revealed it to be a Beaker burial. As Alice Roberts writes, the number of items and the care with which the grave had been created shows that “the Archer was a Very, Very Important Person”.

Roberts starts with the earliest Britons, the early humans and Neanderthals who migrated here in between Ice Ages, before moving on to the waves of visitors who followed, including the earliest Celts and other peoples who populated Britain in the distant days of pre-history. Along the way Roberts also explores a multitude of subjects, from the white, male dominated history of archaeology which has irrevocably and often incorrectly skewed how we view the past, to the nature and purpose of burials, funerals and trinkets in early human societies. Alice Roberts in Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials talks us through the hoard of objects found with the skeleton of the Archer: I liked that this book is written by a professional archaeologist who didn't go out of her way to dumb everything down for the benefit of general public and to please everybody. I loved that she spoke about her personal atheistic views sincerely and unapologetically. The 'Red Lady of Paviland' skeleton, laid out in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (Image: Ethan Doyle White/Wikimedia/Creative Commons) The word liminal has two meanings, the first is “boundary”, the second is “I’ve spent too much time hanging out with archaeologists”. ↩︎She gets down to some juicy evidence as well. Gnawed human bones made by human teeth and cutmarks indicating cannibalism in the caves at Cheddar Gorge. Did our Neanderthal friends bury their dead? Are the Beaker people invaders? Chariot burials during Iron Age times. Intriguing stuff.

There are some 25 known chariot burials in Britain, 11 of which have been sexed. Of these, three are female – nearly a third. Alice grins. ‘We read it now and think: Pytheas could very well have got up to Shetland, with its white nights. Just extraordinary.’This is a terrific, timely and transporting book - taking us heart, body and mind beyond history, to the fascinating truth of the prehistoric past and the present' Bettany Hughes