"Sunday's travel theme here in Rome was death."

"OK, for an anthropologist you have to imagine this is more cheerful than it sounds...."

It is not the distance of time that touches me about these people. I study bones that are tens or hundreds of thousands of years old, distances so vast as to be unimaginable in human terms. Yet the bone persists. The individual is marked in it, and touching her bones creates an immediacy of connection, like traveling through time.