来源：《新科学家》
原文见刊日期：2022年5月28日
Few groups of people exert more power on English imagination than the Anglo-Saxons. They first appear in the historical record in the 1st millennium AD, in the wake of the Roman Empire’s retreat from Britain, and historians have seen them as playing a central role in the emergence of medieval English society. But were they a group who invaded Britain from mainland Europe? Or might there be another explanation hidden in the record?
很少有群体比盎格鲁撒克逊人更能激发英国人的想象力。他们首次出现在历史记录中是在公元第一个千年，罗马帝国从英国撤退之后，历史学家认为他们在中世纪英国社会的出现中起着核心作用。但他们是从欧洲大陆入侵英国的一群人吗？或者历史记录中可能隐藏着另一种解释？
Biological anthropologist Alice Roberts can’t fully answer this question in her engaging new book Buried, but this is for reasons beyond her control.
生物人类学家艾丽丝·罗伯茨在她有趣的新书《埋葬》中无法完全回答这个问题，但这是因为她无法控制的原因。
Buried is a loose sequel to last year’s Ancestors. In both, Roberts devotes each chapter to a grave, the people and artefacts found in it and what it might tell us about ancient British peoples. But where Ancestors focused on prehistoric burials, often many thousands of years old, Buried is about the 1st millennium AD: the period when the Roman conquest failed and Britain was then transformed.
《埋葬》是去年《祖先》的松散续集。在这两本书中，罗伯茨每一章都讲述了一座坟墓，里面的人和文物，以及它可能告诉我们的关于古代英国民族的信息。但《祖先》关注的是史前墓葬，这些墓葬往往有几千年的历史，而《埋葬》则是大约公元的第一个千年：罗马征服失败，英国随之转变的时期。
Writing scientifically about graves and corpses is a challenge, but Roberts threads the needle beautifully. She is rigorous and sceptical, but never lets that stop her from empathising with the people concerned. That human kindness is essential, because some of the stories revealed by the burials are upsetting. Roberts even goes so far as to gently suggest that some readers might want to skip chapter two, which deals with the discovery of a baby’s bones in the grounds of what was once a Roman villa.
科学地写坟墓和尸体是一个挑战，但罗伯茨把针穿得很漂亮。她严谨而怀疑，但从不让这阻止她对相关人员的同情。人性的善良是至关重要的，因为这些墓葬揭示的一些故事令人不安。罗伯茨甚至委婉地建议，有些读者可能想跳过第二章，这一章讲述的是在曾经是罗马别墅的土地上发现婴儿的骨头。
In the final chapter, Roberts knits her stories together into a larger narrative about the post-Roman period in Britain. Her central concern is the pervasive idea, taken from a few rather partial historical sources, that Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain from what is now Germany.
在最后一章中，罗伯茨将她的故事编织成一个关于英国后罗马时期的更大叙事。她最关心的是一种普遍的观点，这种观点来自一些相当片面的历史资料，即盎格鲁-撒克逊人从现在的德国入侵英国。
The evidence for a cultural shift is overwhelming, but such shifts can come about by means other than violent conquest. The alternative is that there were a number of cultural behaviours that emerged in Europe, which we now call Anglo-Saxon. These were then transmitted to Britain by word of mouth without the need for migration. History being messy, it could also, have been caused by a bit of both.
文化转变的证据是压倒性的，但这种转变可以通过暴力征服以外的方式来实现。另一种说法是，欧洲出现了许多文化行为，我们现在称之为盎格鲁-撒克逊文化。文化不需要移民，就通过口口相传传到了英国。历史是混乱的，也可能是暴力征服和口口相传两者兼而有之。
Roberts clearly had big plans on this front. She explains how she sent bone samples from the graves to the Thousand Ancient Genomes project, set up in 2019 by geneticist Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London. But when the covid-19 pandemic kicked off, the institute stopped all of its non-coronavirus work, so Roberts didn’t have the genetic data that would have put her ideas to the test.
罗伯茨显然在这方面有大计划。她解释了她是如何将坟墓中的骨骼样本送到千年远古基因组计划的，该计划由伦敦弗朗西斯克里克研究所的遗传学家本特斯·斯科格伦德于2019年发起。但当新冠大流行开始时，该研究所停止了所有无关新冠病毒的工作，因此罗伯茨没有基因数据来检验她的想法。
Fortunately, even without the pay-off of the genetics, Buried more than earns its keep. Roberts’s nuanced discussions of the burials fuse a half-dozen scholarly fields without any sense of the narrative lurching: any switches between talk of bone shapes and early medieval manuscripts are handled deftly.
幸运的是，即使没有基因数据，《埋葬》这本书也物超所值。罗伯茨对墓葬进行了细致入微的讨论，融合了六个学术领域，丝毫没有叙事上的混乱：在谈论骨骼形状和中世纪早期手稿之间的任何切换都处理得很巧妙。