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.