Britain’s most recognisable archaeologist, Professor Alice Roberts, is raving about thrilling advances in archaeogenomics, the study of ancient DNA, that are giving us a whole new perspective on our ancestors.
“When I was at medical school these things didn’t even seem like a possibility. They weren’t on the horizon,” says Roberts, 51, who has presented 12 series of BBC2’s Digging for Britain, often sporting bright pink hair (“I’ve dyed my hair since I was a teenager — to me it just feels like putting on a different outfit”). “But now we’re reconstructing entire genomes from fragments of DNA from ancient bones.”
Roberts is in a grand, book-lined room of the Royal Society in central London, where that night she will deliver the annual Octavia Hill lecture, in honour of one of the three co-founders of the National Trust, encouraging listeners to reflect on nature, beauty and history. She joined the trust 25 years ago.
“My boyfriend, now husband, and I walked the Cornish coast path,” she says in her beguiling, lightly West Country tones. “It was my idea of perfection. You’re in this beautiful, natural landscape but you’ve also got plenty of history — promontory hillforts, all of that kind of thing. We were so impressed at the fact we were schlepping up these narrow paths that had been cleared of gorse and brambles by National Trust volunteers that we became members and have been ever since. We’re quite unusual in Europe to have this much landscape that is publicly accessible.”
In her lecture Roberts focuses on two examples of new historical discoveries unearthed from our landscapes. One is an Iron Age burial ground in Dorset, where DNA analysis revealed the community traced its lineage back to one woman. This suggested wealth and property were passed from mothers to daughters, with sons being sent outside the community to marry. The pattern has been reinforced by genetic samples from other Iron Age cemeteries across Britain, upending the narrative that patriarchal societies have always prevailed.
“When the Romans write about powerful women like Boudicca, we always suspect a bit of propaganda, that maybe suggesting someone was beaten by a powerful woman was a way of denigrating that person. But maybe we should have taken at face value the Romans telling us the Celts needed civilising, because they were utterly barbaric and had female leaders.”
She also discusses the Amesbury Archer, the remains of an early Bronze Age man found on Salisbury Plain. Recent chemical analysis of his teeth showed he would have spent his childhood 800 miles away, probably in the Alps. The discovery, along with other huge studies of ancient DNA, shows “there was a huge population displacement — potentially as big as 90 per cent — in Britain in the middle of the third millennium BCE, which goes along with the beginning of metalworking in Britain. It’s pre-history before the written word and helps us to be able to start really understanding how people moving around, mobility and migration plays into culture change over time,” she says.
“All this new material and new insights are showing us how diverse societies were in the past and that there isn’t an inevitability for human society to be stratified and unequal. Our culture is not determined by our biology. We can create societies of many different types and somehow that brings us up in the present.”
Critics of the National Trust, who have recently accused the institution of peddling a “woke” agenda, may interpret Roberts’s words as on-brand. However, Roberts — who trained as a doctor then moved into teaching anatomy while completing a PhD in paleopatholgy, the study of disease in human remains, before being signed up as a bone “expert” for Channel 4’s Time Team — insists her message is apolitical.
“The scientist in me is going to say scientific findings are not about telling people to think a certain way. Science is about providing evidence and people will draw lots of different conclusions from that.”
Yet on certain topics, Roberts has definite opinions. Take the Elgin Marbles, which she firmly believes should be returned from the British Museum to Greece. “I think there comes a point where you just have to do the right thing. Someone said to me, ‘But this will set a precedent.’ I said, ‘Well, that shouldn’t be a reason for not doing the right thing … Oh my God, I’ve done something right, now I must do another thing right.’ There are so many things in our museums that have a difficult history attached to them and I don’t think you can just walk away from it. I know the British Museum is thinking very carefully about how it manages all of those issues and so is every other museum. These are big ethical questions which are not just about the past — they are about the now.”
• Alice Roberts: ‘I’ve been estranged from my family for years’
She is equally supportive of the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford’s decision to no longer display its collection of shrunken heads, considered sacred by the Shuar and Achuar peoples of Ecuador. “With all of these artefacts, you have to look at all of the sensitivities and understand their heritage as well,” Roberts says. “I teach anatomy to medical students and so a lot of my work is about how you deal respectfully with human remains. There are all sorts of issues about did that person give consent for their body to be used in that way. That’s very much at the forefront when we’re talking about modern human remains, but I think it applies to the past as well. Just because you want to look at something, somebody else might not want you to look at it, or might feel that actually it’s of historical importance to them. The most important thing is to have a conversation, to make people aware of these things and not either to say brutally, ‘We’re going to continue displaying these,’ or to take them off display and put them in a box.”
Roberts grew up in Bristol (now she lives in a village nearby), the daughter of an aeronautical engineer and an art teacher. She has spoken of her “strict” Christian upbringing, which she rebelled against in her teens when she became an atheist “and did not believe the supernatural explanations any more”. For three years she was president of Humanists UK and is now a patron.
Her campaigning against public funding for church schools led to a permanent estrangement with her mother, who in 2018 publicly proclaimed herself “embarrassed” and “upset” by her daughter’s claims that faith schools had an “indoctrination” programme. Roberts won’t talk about any of this today, but last year she told Radio 4’s All in the Mind that she didn’t attend her mother’s funeral because she’d already experienced “a kind of grief” upon realising there was no hope of reconciliation.
As professor of public engagement in science at the University of Birmingham, Roberts is calmly confident that the public has more faith in science and scientists than may sometimes appear the case on shouty platforms such as X.
“We can maybe worry about public trust but we can’t just listen to the louder voices on social media and draw that conclusion,” she says. “We have to do some proper scientific work and look at surveys such as the British Social Attitudes survey. Those show that people actually are trusting science and scientists. There hasn’t been a huge drop-off.”
Nonetheless, social media has enabled the rapid spread of disinformation. “Again, it’s very difficult not to slip into abstractions. The type of mass communication we have now is a completely new challenge we’ve never had to face before. But although it may be new in terms of the scale, it’s really the same thing that happened when the printing press came around. Suddenly people could print all sorts of things and disseminate ideas very quickly and they could be printing pamphlets peddling snake oil. Equally, the first publication of the Royal Society was Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, where he started sharing with people what he was seeing under his wonderful microscope. So we’ve long had: do you trust the pamphlet when you don’t know where it’s come from and who the author is? It’s exactly the same thing on the internet.”
So is Roberts, who has two children, aged 14 and 11, optimistic about the future? “It varies,” she says. “I’m very optimistic about the tools we have at our disposal. For me, the long view helps. The last book I wrote was Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond and it made me feel immensely grateful to be living in the 21st century with all of the scientific advances that have come along in the 500 years since, to be living in the era of antibiotics. In the Middle Ages, you’re in an era where if somebody realised they had advanced syphilis or leprosy that was it. Then practically half of children didn’t reach adulthood. So we’re experiencing the world in a very different, and I would say better, way.”
What is she less optimistic about? “Mostly about the political will to harmonise the power of science to make people’s lives better and to spread those benefits widely through society. Because they’re not spread evenly. There’s withholding of information and benefits by certain forces. We saw it during Covid with vaccines hoarding.”
Two glass cabinets behind us illustrate achievements of women in Stem subjects. Roberts, with A-levels in physics, chemistry, biology and art, is surely a fabulous role model. “I hate the Stem acronym,” she says. “Hate it with an absolute intensity. When I’m communicating I try to use as little jargon as possible and this is educational jargon. ‘Science, technology, engineering and maths’ lumps all the sciences into something homogeneous, which is really unhelpful and doesn’t allow us to see where the problems lie, because we don’t have a problem with women studying biology or psychology, but we have a big problem still with women studying physics and engineering.
“It all goes back to my fundamental beliefs about education, which is that it’s not about creating cogs to go in a machine. It’s so reductive to have it become all about ‘in ten years’ time we’re going to need people to fill these jobs’. Education should be about human flourishing and empowering people to find their route in life.”
The Octavia Hill lecture will be broadcast exclusively on Times Radio on Saturday at 7pm
