Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T01:58:50.031Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

'DOING' ARCHAEOLOGY Digging Through Darkness: Chronicles of an Archaeologist. By CARMEL SCHRIRE. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Pp. x + 276. $29.95 (ISBN 0-8139-1558 + 9).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1997

JAMES DENBOW
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin

Abstract

It is hard to put a single categorical label on Carmel Schrire's Digging Through Darkness. It is at once a chronicle of her personal development as an archaeologist and a critique of the colonial dialectic through which indigenous peoples and European invaders have come to be intertwined. Schrire, as a white South African woman, is a product of this process, adding texture to a skilfully written book interlaced with the kind of earthy irony often intrinsic to multi-cultural dialogue in southern Africa. The book ranges from panoramic discussions of European expansion and colonization to introspective essays on the contradictions of growing up Jewish in South Africa, ‘a minority within the larger white group ... [that] endure[d] the persistent effort of certain factions to ally with the Nazis’, while at the same time taking advantage of an entrenched, colour-coded caste system under which ‘the Jewish population cashed in the chips of their appearance’ (p. 30).

Type
REVIEWS
Copyright
© 1997 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)