Johnson tracks archaeologists around the globe from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, from Newport, Rhode Island, to Machu Picchu. She digs alongside experts on an eighteenth-century sugar plantation and in a first-century temple to Apollo. She hunts for bodies with forensic archaeologists in the vast and creepy Pine Barrens of New Jersey, drinks beer with an archaeologist of ancient beverages, and makes stone tools like a caveman.

By turns amusing and profound, Lives in Ruins, with its wild cast of characters, finds new ways to consider what is worth salvaging from our past.