Burial

Abstract

The following is an historical fiction about a burial that took place in Sunghir, Russia, circa 32,000 B.C.E. It is historical in the sense that it is based on archaeological evidence of the grave. It is fiction in the sense that it invents a story around the grave that has no substrate in an archive. Since the grave's excavation in 1969, many archaeologists have interpreted it as an early example of the unearned status of elites, though some other interpretations exist. My aim is to describe, in Saidiya Hartman’s phrasing, ‘what might have happened or what might have been said or what might have been done’ where archive and artifacts do not go. Even if such a fiction does not recover an ‘unrecoverable past’, it might nevertheless succeed at what historical fiction does best: making us feel, through force of detail, as though it were real and as though we were there.