November 2021

I have finally, alas, had to say goodbye to my entertaining job as a tour guide at the Tomb of the Eagles, closed permanently because of the Covid pandemic. It was such fun: not only was I working with a group of really nice colleagues in a beautiful piece of countryside but I was actually being paid to talk for hours about my favourite subject to a captive audience (well, they could have walked out if they were bored). It was sad to say goodbye to the familiar artefacts – the beautifully crafted stone mace head, the terrible pottery (I could do better myself), and especially to the three skulls we used to hold up and explain to the public, ‘Jock Tamsin’, ‘Granny’ and ‘Charlie Girl’. They had almost come to seem like friends.

This gave rise to a curious thought. For 53 years I have been “playing with my forefathers’ joints”, as it were (William Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet” Act IV Scene III). I dug up my first skeleton in a Roman graveyard at the age of 17, closely followed a few months later by an Iron Age chieftain’s cremated bones. The skeleton was a bit of a disappointment, as it was the only one in the cemetery that had any grave goods, and since I was a relative beginner they took it away from me and got someone else to finish digging it. The chieftain I principally remember because it was the depths of winter and we all had to kneel on ice-cold chalk around a circular hole containing the bones and goodies, passing a golfer's hand-warmer round to unfreeze our numb fingers.

When I went to work at the museum in St Albans, I was greeted every morning by our three Roman skeletons, displayed in their coffins in the “Death and Burial” section with their grave goods on shelves around them. They were part of my life for decades and they, too, came to seem like friends. They were later joined by the amazing grave goods from a pair of Romano British graves discovered a few miles away. One contained what would normally be considered female grave goods and the other what would normally be considered male ones. Unfortunately, the bones had been cremated, which makes it difficult, although not always impossible, to identify the sex. Very few of the fragments from the “male” grave had been recovered, which made it even more difficult. There was considerable academic argument as to whether the “male” was a male or a warlike liberated Celtic female. Oh dear…

There were many boxes of human bones behind the scenes in the museum stores, since there had been many excavations on graveyards, Roman and medieval, in and around the town, and we were responsible for storing the lot. Those presumed to be Christian had to be given a Christian reburial after study; we had an arrangement with a local vicar (I hasten to add that all human skeletons were treated with respect.) One of our staff had a special interest in human bone and used to give lovely talks, illustrated with examples of pathological specimens. He was particularly keen on leprosy and syphilis, but my favourite was a medieval skull with a large slice taken out across the top, which was considered to be the result of a sword cut by a mounted soldier cutting downwards at someone on foot, possibly during the Wars of the Roses. We did have two battles in the streets of the medieval town.

As for their teeth, from the Neolithic to the early modern period, before and after the availability of lots of sugar, I have seen things in ancient jawbones that would make your toes curl. Like Granny, the old lady from the Tomb of the Eagles, who had half the roof of her mouth eaten away. NEVER miss your appointment with your dentist, and be thankful that we now have anaesthetics and antibiotics. Be very thankful.

Those of our bones and our bags of crunchy cremations which came from relatively recent excavations were carefully stored in standard boxes on the shelves of roller racking in a store with proper security and environmental controls. On one occasion, however, we did discover a forgotten cache of bones from an early excavation, stored in a basement below the next-door public toilet and forgotten about for decades. They were infested with dry rot and had to be decontaminated by one unfortunate member of staff, garbed in special protective clothing.

Not so dry bones.