Crypt by Alice Roberts review – resurrecting the past

From murdered Vikings to an anchorite with syphilis, how human remains are reshaping historyIn 2008 a stash of human bones was discovered in a ditch running under St John’s College, Oxford. They dated from the Anglo-Saxon period and, once reassembled, revealed themselves as the remains of 35 young adult males. The fact that these men had been thrown into a mass grave, with none of the usual pieties, suggested that they were outlaws of one kind or other. At the time England was engaged