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Author: Peter Matthews
Genres: Investigative Non-Fiction
The dead are not at peace. Across Berlin, body parts keep surfacing in places they should never be: a human larynx tossed in a box of stationery, a tuft of hair hidden in a manuscript, bones unearthed during campus construction and burned without ceremony.
Each fragment leads back to Europe’s colonial crimes—and to the silence of the institutions that house them. Dig Where You Stand uncovers the largest collection of plundered human remains ever assembled, much of it built in Berlin under ethnologist Felix von Luschan and later exploited by Nazi racial science.
Skulls, hearts, and bones from Africa, Asia, and beyond were catalogued as specimens, not lives. This is empire’s legacy, hidden in Europe’s museums, libraries, and archives. But this is not just history.
The book follows the living who refuse silence: descendants searching for ancestors, curators confronting the skulls in their care, activists and politicians grappling with shameful inheritances. Born out of the acclaimed podcast series and now accompanied by a major BBC World Service documentary, Dig Where You Stand fuses archival investigation, narrative non-fiction, and personal testimony. It is a searing reckoning with the bones beneath Europe’s feet. The past is not buried. It refuses to be.
For readers of Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, and Lauren Markham’s A Map of Future Ruins — works that confront the silences of empire and the violence of archives.
Author: Peter Matthews
Genres: Investigative Non-Fiction
The dead are not at peace. Across Berlin, body parts keep surfacing in places they should never be: a human larynx tossed in a box of stationery, a tuft of hair hidden in a manuscript, bones unearthed during campus construction and burned without ceremony.
Each fragment leads back to Europe’s colonial crimes—and to the silence of the institutions that house them. Dig Where You Stand uncovers the largest collection of plundered human remains ever assembled, much of it built in Berlin under ethnologist Felix von Luschan and later exploited by Nazi racial science.
Skulls, hearts, and bones from Africa, Asia, and beyond were catalogued as specimens, not lives. This is empire’s legacy, hidden in Europe’s museums, libraries, and archives. But this is not just history.
The book follows the living who refuse silence: descendants searching for ancestors, curators confronting the skulls in their care, activists and politicians grappling with shameful inheritances. Born out of the acclaimed podcast series and now accompanied by a major BBC World Service documentary, Dig Where You Stand fuses archival investigation, narrative non-fiction, and personal testimony. It is a searing reckoning with the bones beneath Europe’s feet. The past is not buried. It refuses to be.
For readers of Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, and Lauren Markham’s A Map of Future Ruins — works that confront the silences of empire and the violence of archives.