The world is a vast graveyard; our ancestors are all around us, a human link between past and present. Every year many burials are excavated in the course of building work or archaeological research - possibly of a medieval monk found boxed up below a herbacious border, or a couple of 4000-year-old skulls discovered deep beneath the Yorkshire Dales. In this book, based on two television series, an archaeologist unearths the secrets of the past and pieces together ancient clues to deduce how each individual lived and died. Each of the nine chapters focuses on one burial, the story of which unfolds as the excavation and analysis progress, and they range from the neolithic family in Dorset to a Saxon cemetery underneath RAF Lakenheath.