Humanity worked together to build a ship to travel to other worlds. It hung together long enough to find one with evidence of intelligent life, albeit dead for 100,000 years now. Whether humanity will continue working together long enough to solve the mysteries of the aliens' lives and why they died out after only 3,000 years is another matter.
The main source of conflict changes over the course of the book. Initially, it looks like the problem will be a general from a South American country who has accompanied the new rotation of specialists, because the less-wealthy nations are convinced that there's more going on here than simply teasing out the threads of the society of giant, sentient crab people (I've been playing the South Park game on the PS4, so now I've got, "taste like crab, talk like people" in my head.) Like, new weapons or designed plagues being developed for the major powers to use against everyone else!
Fair concern, but Brummer dispenses with it as an immediate problem early on after the main character loses his patience and explains why their task is so difficult in a manner the general understands. After that, the question is whether archaeologist Ian Macauley can help come up with an insight to help them understand what they've found.
This is probably the most interesting part, as Brummer envisions an intelligent species that derive much of their information from electromagnetic signals in the air, who seemingly expanded out from a single central point in a steady wave, who seem to have found it sufficient to build just one of most things. Only one airship had been found, one large water crossing vessel, and so on.
The part where Macauley has the engineers build him a facsimile mechanical suit, complete with nodes that send information about electrical signals to his brain, so he can try living as a crab people, is a bit much. Brummer had spent the time establishing Macauley was the type to become absorbed in his work and go to extremes to find answers, so it was at least consistent.
Brummer does an excellent job letting that recede into the background for most of the book. Even if there are other reasons to want the answer, the characters are curious. They want to know, to finally have something that ties together and explains everything they've unearthed. So the pursuit of knowledge takes over, but he drops enough hints over the two-year tour that the concerns back on Earth are never entirely out of mind.
That makes the final shift at the end, once Macauley does provide a hypothesis (going to be difficult to ever prove, I would imagine), not a complete shock. They cracked the code, but the same old bigger problems are still waiting.
'The air was growing warmer and drier, and there was an odour in it which he didn't recognize. A word burst into his mind like a magnesium flare:
Alien!
Instantly he was clawing at his harness release. Why the hell was he lying here like a dummy when outside was the whole new planet he had come here to explore?'
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