The team

'Old bones' expert

Dr Alice Roberts is the Extreme Archaeology team's scientific and medical officer and human bones expert. She is a fully qualified doctor and osteoarchaeologist, with a degree in medicine and anatomy, who has learnt to deliver those skills in the most extreme locations as she has developed her climbing and caving experience.

A senior teaching fellow in anatomy at Bristol University, where she teaches on the medical, dental and science courses, Alice also works with the police as a forensic anthropologist. She has appeared on numerous Time Team programmes over the last three years.

Her first involvement with television archaeology involved writing reports on skeletons that had been found on excavations. 'The first TV dig I actually went on was in 2001,' she says, 'where we found lots of Anglo-Saxon burials – and also, rather strangely, loads of bronze buckets. I did quite a few in Time Team's 2003 series, but only a couple in the 2004 series as I was tied up with making Extreme Archaeology.'

She describes how she became interested in osteoarchaeology – or 'old bones', as people insist on referring to it – as 'a bit of a strange one'.

Qualified doctor

'I'm actually a qualified doctor,' she says, 'but I did a bit of teaching during what was meant to be surgical training – and ended up liking it so much that I stayed in the university! At the same time, I met some great people at Bristol who introduced me to osteoarchaeology and palaeopathology.

'One of those people was Dr Jonathan Musgrave, who I'd come across before, when he unwrapped the mummy at Bristol Museum. With lots of other people, I went to watch the unwrapping on a live video link. I was eight at the time, so maybe that was when my fascination with the subject really started. As a medic, I just find it fascinating how much you can tell about a person when all you've got is their bones.'

The red hair

As for the red hair, which always attracts a lot of attention, Alice says: 'My hair has been various shades of red since I was about 18. I tried black once, but it just turned my scalp blue. I had to tone it down when I was working as a doctor – but now there's no stopping me!'