Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond

The new book by the author of Ancestors and Buried - the final instalment in Professor Alice Roberts' acclaimed trilogy.The new synthesis of history, archaeology and genetics offers us a
much more detailed picture of the past than we’ve ever been able to see
before. Not just at a grand scale – though it certainly does that too – but at
an individual level. Piecing together different sources of information, we
can paint detailed portraits of people, some of whose names we know;
many we don’t.Osteoarchaeology, palaeopathology and now archaeogenomics are
transforming our understanding of the past, making us look again at the
broad sweep of history, now that we see more clearly how epidemics were
ignited and spread, and now that we can so precisely diagnose the diseases
that people were suffering from. We can unlock secrets from bones
preserved for centuries in tombs, graves and crypts.