I use BCE/CE rather than BC/AD – it’s the academic standard and is religiously neutral, as well as having been in use since the seventeenth century, so it’s not a new thing. And so we get unending blather that really feels like she got drunk and just rambled on to her bartender about her thoughts and feelings regarding burials in Roman and early Medieval Britain. Alice has been a Professor of Public Engagement with Science at the University of Birmingham since 2012.

The finite span of a human life is what creates its meaning; we have limited time her, and that prompts us to reflect on how best to use this precious time, and what legacies we'd like to leave. But Caerleon was her own project, and the summary monograph on the amphitheatre, published in 1928, bears just her name. The archaeological evidence (burial practices and grave goods) suggest not only that older, native British burial rites were wide-spread, but that grave goods suggest a far closer connection to more northern regions of Europe. Only one other vaguely similar burial had ever been discovered in Britain – a lead coffin in Colchester, with a lead pipe sticking out of it. And the other mention is written in stone, an inscription carved into a great slab of Purbeck marble discovered in Chichester, during building work in 1723.First of all, it’s very biased – it was necessarily produced by literate individuals, who were elite Romanophiles. William Camden’s Britannia, published in 1586, records that the original local name of the fortress was ‘Kaer Lheion on Wysk’ – the Fortress of the Legion on the Usk. The remains were discovered in the 1920’s, but Roberts re-examines them telling the story of the probable funerary rites. There’s a wonderful sepia-tinted photograph of the excavation team: twenty-three men, one small boy and – in the centre, holding a book – one woman.

Again there are no definitive answers, just possibilities that may make greater sense given the other material finds at the site. And finally we have no idea exactly when anything occurred because there are no/extremely bias records. Across millennia, generations of people have flowed through regions and continents like water over rock: the landscapes remain, as do the burials – fixed coordinates amid the flux of time.But the results were not in by the time her contract specified she needed to turn in the manuscript, and so she had to fill up the required page count with something. It’s not always easy, and how much I can reliably infer depends on the state of preservation of the human remains. The mention of 'foreigners' is deliberate: Roberts is interested in the narratives of waves of invasion in the post-Roman period -- 'Gildas, Bede and then the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle present this picture of a Roman, Christian culture destroyed by pagan, Saxon culture' -- and argues that it's more likely to have been peaceful migration, or at least assimilation of raiders.