Digging Through Darkness: Chronicles of an Archaeologist

In Digging Through Darknes, Carmel Schrire interweaves art and fact to recreate a distant world. Tracking the broad sweep of European expansion into Africa, Australia, and the Pacific, Schrire focuses on the evidence unearthed in archaeological sites, leading the reader through a wealth of strata and artifacts, to see how inferences may be drawn from heaps of broken bones and stones. This interweaving gives voice not only to the literate colonists but also to illiterate native people who endured dispossession in silence.

Library Journal

An odd book, this! Opening as a biography of an immigrant Jewish family to South Africa, it becomes an ethnography of the Hottentots and Bushmen. Focused on South Africa, a less widely treated area, the material mainly deals with other aborigines and colonization of the Pacific Rim. These are called the writings of an archaeologist, but the book is in fact truly cultural anthropology; dig discussions are meager. Readers are thus inevitably confused when they are swept from the Dutch East India Company to Captian Cook's debacle in Hawaii with little warning. But the strangest feature of all, in a scholarly document, is the superb, almost fictional prose; Schrire's powerful language, as much as anything, contributes better than any systematic agenda could have managed to the clarity of her ultimate message-that with no species of animal have we behaved more brutually and mindlessly, or caused the extinction of more of its families, than with our own. Useful in a variety of collections from the academic, public, high school and even some special libraries.-Jo-Ann D. Suleiman, SANAD Support Technologies, Rockville, Md.

Carmel Schrire is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her publications include The Alligator Rivers: Prehistory and Ecology in Western Arnhem Land; Past and Present in Hunter-Gatherer Studies; and The Future of Former Foragers in South Africa and Australia.