There was a stunned silence as the young woman took this in, then she grinned, holding out her hand. ‘Doctor Baaker? I’m so sorry, I didn’t recognise you. I’m Sara Van Dijk, a lab assistant here at the facility. Give me a minute to telephone down so I can let Doctor Pinney know we’re on our way. You’re welcome to look around while you wait.’

She waved me towards the display room, removed a slim black mobile from her pocket and began speaking into it. As I wandered around the exhibits, my gaze was drawn to a clear box the same size and shape as an oubliette. The box was filled with artificial sand, an assortment of blackened rib bones and a human skull which floated a few centimetres below the Perspex surface.

‘That’s Maja,’ Sara said, coming up behind me. ‘She was the first skeleton recovered by the team during a rescue operation on an archaeological dig in Oosterpoort. People used the place as a burial ground for thousands of years, but Maja is special. She was only twenty when she died. According to a leading anthropologist, she was some kind of Frisian warrior – there’s evidence to suggest she sustained severe trauma to her chest and skull at some stage in her short life. She took a spear to the chest sometime between 1262 and 1270, probably fighting off the Hollanders during one of the first Frisian wars. Most unusually, whoever administered the mortuary rites made sure her sword was buried on her left-hand side. Since warriors generally wore their swords on the right, we can assume she was left-handed. If you go through there later,’ Sara said, pointing towards a small antechamber, ‘you can see what she might have looked like. An anthropologist from Utrecht made a complete facial reconstruction using her remains and an artist used the scans to build a full-body replica. It’s really quite extraordinary.’

Swiping us through the double doors, she led the way down a short flight of stairs into the museum’s climate-controlled basement. It was even colder down there than it had been upstairs in the public display area and the pungent scent of chemical agents and decomposition pervaded the corridor, despite the wintry blast from the air-conditioning vents overhead. We passed a few open doors – storage rooms, mostly, metal shelves crammed with archive boxes and trolleys and broken bollards, the kind of detritus found in every museum basement. Sara stopped in front of a white door, knocked loudly, then pushed it open. Inside the lab, long metal-topped workbenches reflected the clinical glare of electric ceiling lights and the warm glow of wall-mounted computer screens.