Story about one of Norway's 16 cities during the Middle Ages, excavated in 30 seasons from the early 1950s until 1981 and producing 45,000 artifacts and many human remains, too. Only now is a new generation taking the work of interpreting the excavated materials.
Of course there are many more societies without written records than there are ones with a system of writing or other form of keeping records. Now in 2022 still there are something between 6700 and 6900 human languages, of which just 100 or so read and write in the same language that they speak. However, population-wise a sizable majority of living-breathing humans speak just one of 20 or 30 languages. All the diversity in the remaining ones accounts for a fraction of those walking the planet. In other words, "people without history" (part of the title for Eric Wolf's famous book from the 1980s) are relatively few persons, but relatively most languages/societies. Stated in reverse, the people who do record history account for relatively few societies, but numerically far outnumber the souls who live out their lives with no writing use.
