In 1974, a young Israeli student of archaeology takes charge of her first dig--to find the lives she digs up impinging on her own. In 1950, Hammama Madmoni, a new Yemeni Jewish immigrant to Israel, gives birth to a daughter in a hospital in Jerusalem. The child disappears, and she is told the child died. Twenty-four years later to the day, Orit Nussbaum sits beside the Holocaust-survivor who raised her in the same hospital. Orit is an archaeologist in graduate school neglecting her dig at Gibeah to do her duty by a mother who suffered too much from the horrors she saw in Auschwitz to be much of a nurturer. Orit, having visions of the ancient lives she is uncovering, struggles with the patriarchy of the field of her study and of the myths created then and now, colonization and her place in the world.