Ghost Maps

Drawn from the author’s experiences during more than a decade of archaeological fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, this astonishing collection of linked essays explores what violence leaves behind, in a debut for readers of Mary Roach, Maggie Nelson, and Leslie Jamison. Annalisa Bolin has always liked the dead. She’s drawn to the traces that linger: a blue bead, a shard of clay, a fragment of skull sunk deep in the earth. Ghost maps, she calls them, traced over the world of the living. After her first excavation in Ghana, Bolin embarks on life as an archaeologist. Her work takes her across continents—from the genocide memorials of Rwanda, working alongside preservation teams striving to immortalize the truth of the slaughter, to African skulls collected in Berlin colonial museums, to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, where the emergence of inconvenient bones exposes a society literally built on nineteenth-century cemeteries. As she traces the echoes of violence, the initial thrill of touching the past becomes more than she bargained for: a haunting in which the dead never leave her. Winner of the 2025 Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, Ghost Maps delivers a stunning and deeply affecting exploration of the tension between preservation and violation in archaeological study. Bolin expertly balances historical accounts with the intimacy of her own experiences in the field, and the question of what it means to live alongside the dead.