In Digging through Darkness, Carmel Schrire interweaves art and fact to recreate a distant world. She combines autobiography, historical archaeology, and fictional reconstructions to explore the roots and consequences of colonial conquest in Africa, Australia, and the Pacific. The book takes its unique shape from Schrire's intimate connection with her subject - she is a native white South African, the Jewish descendant of a colonist who arrived at the Cape of Good Hope over a hundred years ago.

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. These findings are then interwoven with historical sources to present an integrated picture of the past.

When evidence is insufficient to propel the inference, the author constructs a fictional account, inventing scenes that relate archaeological sites to historical documents. This interweaving gives voice not only to the literate colonists but also to illiterate native people who endured dispossession in silence.