Right now I\u2019m 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\u2019d 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.
\nLast Thursday our trench came across a layer of charcoal in the soil, which we hadn\u2019t 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. \u201cThe room burned down,\u201d 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\u2019s say, rather than a house fire, we would have seen ash, not charcoal. Charcoal comes from a smothered fire, it\u2019s what happens to smoldering wood when it can\u2019t 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.
\nPutting all these elements together\u2014the 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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