There’s something irresistible about peering into the past – not just through textbook timelines, but through the soil, the bones, the stories buried with them. After finishing Ancestors by Alice Roberts, I found myself drawn to other books that don’t just tell history, but dig it up.

Here are six reads that unearth the past – from the Bronze Age to bog bodies, from DNA to myth:

• Buried– Alice Roberts
  An exploration of the stories told by ancient burial sites across Britain, weaving archaeological detail with reflections on identity, ancestry, and the echoes we leave in the past.

• Kindred – Rebecca Wragg Sykes
  An intimate and surprisingly tender look at Neanderthals, stripping away outdated assumptions and showing the complexity of their lives.

• The Bog People – P.V. Glob
  A classic of archaeological storytelling, detailing the eerie, haunting discoveries of Iron Age bodies preserved in peat bogs.

• The Real Valkyrie – Nancy Marie Brown
  Blending fact and fiction to reconstruct the life of a female Viking warrior, using one real grave as the spark for a broader feminist narrative.

• The Dig – John Preston
  A fictionalized account of the Sutton Hoo excavation — quiet, elegant, and beautifully atmospheric.

• Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari
  A sweeping history of humankind, tracing our journey from early Homo sapiens to the present day, weaving archaeology, anthropology, and big-picture philosophy.

Whether you’re fascinated by grave goods, ancient DNA, or the murky stories we try to tell about our origins, these books offer different ways to engage with the past — and remind us it’s not as distant as we sometimes think.