A review by anpu325
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

5.0

The best work of fiction related to archaeology that I have ever read. It engages with what archaeology, in this case experimental archaeology, aims to do which is to understand the past as well as the inherent impossibility of ever accomplishing this. The author brings in issues of class, gender, and race in a masterful way. How does the way in which we envision an ideal past connect to racism in the present? How are issues of gender implicated in how we want to imagine the past? The male characters assume society was sexist in the ancient past and try to force the female characters to behave according to their wishes using this as an excuse. Really, they use a kind of imagined, idealized past to justify their own modern sexism. Moss also considers how class intersects with archaeology. Who gets to study the past? The wealthy and the educated, who take the exclusion of working class people from the field as a matter of course. This profound examination of archaeology as a field and how modern biases shape the reconstruction of the past made this a 5-star read for me. But even beyond that, the prose was so beautiful. The descriptions of nature resonated with me. And the way that, in spite of all the issues mentioned above, the protagonist still finds moving points of resonance with people who lived in the past. For me, that is what archaeology is all about. We need to recognize all of the issues implicit in who gets to do archaeology and how their beliefs and biases shape their work. But, still, the beauty of archaeology is that we can connect with people in the past in profoundly moving and life-changing ways.