Ancestors by Alice Roberts

Author:Alice Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2021-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

Over the winter months of the 1880s and ’90s, the agricultural labourers at Rushmore found themselves tasked with carrying out a different sort of fieldwork. Completely unskilled in archaeology at first, they were supervised by Pitt Rivers, aided by a small team of specialist assistants. These assistants also recorded the digs – surveying, creating illustrations and models of the landscape. Pitt Rivers wrote up the digs and published his analyses in four weighty volumes. Adrian had dug out one of these beautiful books for us to look at, down in the museum stores – but that wasn’t all he had to show us.

We left Adrian’s office and filed down the spiral staircase and out into the public galleries. Then we passed through a side door, just to the side of the entrance of the museum’s main archaeological gallery, and we were back in the nether world, with that behind-the-scenes frisson of excitement I always get in these spaces. I’ve spent so much of my professional life in places like this, passing through doors the public visitors don’t even notice, into stores and labs where treasures from centuries past are kept safely for generations to come. But that passage – from public to private space, from open to secret – never fails to excite me.

This store was an old gallery, repurposed. The corridor we entered through was painted verdigris green, with small landscape murals floating on the wall, missing the displays of artefacts that they were originally designed to contextualise. Around a corner, Adrian had assembled a few objects on a large table: one of the Cranborne Chase excavation volumes and two boxes. He opened the excavation volume to a page he’d bookmarked, then invited us to lift the lid on one of the boxes – and Turi did the honours. Inside the box was an exquisite scale model of an excavated grave: a skeleton buried in a cylindrical pit, dug down into the chalk. Then Adrian handed round a box of gloves – he only had small ones to hand – and we all squeezed our hands into them. Now we could open the second box. From its size and shape, I already knew what we’d find inside: a skull. Its fragments had been carefully assembled, glued together. The jaw was attached to the skull by monofilament fishing line, passing through a tiny hole drilled into the condyle of the mandible, and through the earhole – the external auditory meatus – of the cranium. Adrian had cross-referenced this small collection: the skull belonged to the burial illustrated in the model, and the page of Pitt Rivers’ report bore a photograph of it.

We passed the skull round. Tom and I were particularly interested in the earholes. Was there any sediment still inside them? If so, the tiny ear bones or ossicles might well be in there – and very recent studies had suggested that it might be possible to obtain well-preserved DNA from these minute bones – saving us from having to drill samples out of the base of the skull itself.

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