Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain

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Further excavations, on the amphitheatre, were carried out in the winter of 1926 into 1927, after the Daily Mail raised funds, with additional financial support coming in from – quite bizarrely – American fans of King Arthur. Silchester is another important administrative capital – which may have come under his control as well. 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.

And although the grassy banks of ‘King Arthur’s Round Table’ provided a convenient source of dressed stone, ready for use in much less ambitious building projects in the town, much of Roman Caerleon lay undisturbed, underground, forgotten. The idea of British culture (and the British population) being enriched by all these civilising influences – bringing farming, metalworking, Roman civilisation and the rest – is a colonialist construction: the incomers are a Good Thing. There are some written records from Roman Britain itself, but these are quite specialised and narrow in what they reveal.It was a city, he wrote, whose ‘magnificent royal palaces, with lofty gilded roofs, made it even rival the grandeur of Rome’.

But Caerleon was her own project, and the summary monograph on the amphitheatre, published in 1928, bears just her name. Roberts discusses what can be determined of the first millennium British history, culture and migration from bones; grave goods; ancient DNA, isotope studies and other archaeological findings. Roberts discusses funerary and death rites in the Roman, Dark Ages and Anglo-Saxon eras of Britain, using a selection of archaeological finds to lay out history and educated guesses. Into the medieval period and beyond, Caerleon remained small – occupying just a fraction of the original footprint of the fortress.Those islanders had control of precious resources – grain, cattle, gold, silver and iron – and had also assisted with uprisings in northern Gaul a century before.