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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 posting in Accra, Ghana, Bolin embarks on life as a field 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 the collection of African skulls 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.
Annalisa Bolin is an archaeologist and anthropologist who has worked in Rwanda, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Boulevard The Rumpus, Longreads, Sapiens, Tampa Review, and many other literary and academic venues. Since receiving her PhD from Stanford University, she has held fellowships at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Aarhus University, and Linnaeus University. Currently at World Monuments Fund, she is also a consulting scholar at Penn Museum’s Cultural Heritage Center. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.