Right now I’m sitting in a restaurant run by an expat, eating a cheeseburger and looking at a decorative drawing of Sherlock Holmes. First of all, not what you’d expect from a trip to Turkey, is it? But more to the point, the drawing of Sherlock Holmes reminded me of a moment in my trench this past week, when I witnessed some Sherlockian deduction firsthand.
Last Thursday our trench came across a layer of charcoal in the soil, which we hadn’t seen for the first 50 cm we had unearthed. Professor Howe, perched on a wall in a Batman-like stance, pointed out the soil change to us. My first thought was that it had come from a bonfire, but the charcoal was too widespread. “The room burned down,” Howe said without hesitation. I accepted this without too much thought because it made sense; fires make charcoal, right? But it is more complicated than that. If wood had simply burned, if the there had been a large bonfire, let’s say, rather than a house fire, we would have seen ash, not charcoal. Charcoal comes from a smothered fire, it’s what happens to smoldering wood when it can’t use oxygen to burn down to ash. So that means that the fire in our trench was smothered, and with a layer of wall fall on top of the charcoal, it seems likely that the rocks from the wall were what smothered the fire.
Putting all these elements together—the charcoal, the rocks on top, and the knowledge that wood needs to be deprived of oxygen in order to form charcoal, Howe concluded that the room burned down, first taking down the wooden roof, and then bits of the wall with it. Archeology is a mystery, as we talked about in our trench that day. It takes logical reasoning, and perhaps some knowledge of chemistry, to deduce historical events laid right at your feet.
