“And you know about Heinrich Schliemann’s dig, in Hisarlik, about fifty miles away from mine. Schliemann’s site—”
“Is King Priam’s palace, right?” Lady Elliot interjected. “He found the real city of Troy.”
“It’s possible. The thing is, sometimes, just by digging, we can figure out when something happened. The same is true in London, or even Oxford. Dig a little and you might find a road from the 1800s, complete with dated coins, dig a little deeper, something Medieval, a little deeper, something Roman, and deeper still—”
“Saxon, or Celtic.” Lord Elliot straightened. I’d been on the right track here, treating them like my students. Just like my students, they were making connections and proud of themselves.
“Right. Well, when Schliemann dug, he went through the same layers of time. The foundation of a home, a road, and then, deep in the earth, he found the foundations of an ancient city. Troy.” I nodded at Lady Elliot. “At least, that’s what he called it. We know now—dating those items he took—that the city existed around 1300 to 950 B.C. The Bronze Age. At this point, people were beginning to write, and had invented the potter’s wheel. They smelted copper. Now, when I found that shard, I had to go deeper.
“I went past the Bronze Age, the Stone Age. I found evidence of humans from fifty-thousand years ago, when we were just beginning to speak to each other, and then I dug even deeper.”
I realized then, the crowd around me had silenced. A quick peek revealed that I had the attention of the room. My heart pounded a little, both with nervousness—but also excitement. It didn’t take much to whisk me back to that moment, when I had suddenly found evidence of civilization where there should be none.
“Like finding there was a Rome before Rome. Or—a Peugeot—twenty feet below Pompeii.” Dr. St. John took another sip of his drink.
I nodded. “Yes. Like that. So instead of following the trail of items for five thousand years—I have to dig through more millennia than there is written history.”
“But you returned there, and found nothing else. Only stone and sand.” It was as if Dr. St. John and I were a team. I lobbed the ball into the air, he spiked it over the net.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t.” And I was still disappointed about it.
“So, how did you come to believe a piece could be here? If no one dug as deep as you’d dug. Or maybe they did?” Lady Elliot asked. “How do you know it wasn’t placed there years later?”
She got right down to it, and hit the nail on the head.
“I don’t.”
“But the radiocarbon dating, my understanding is the pottery is made of gold. And gold can’t be dated.”
“No. But I was lucky because obsidian is. Andthatcould be dated.” I was equally hung up on the dating, but it wasn’t a subjective piece of evidence. In conjunction with what non-man-made materials I found around the shard, I was pretty confident it was right.
“You don’t think it could have been placed there? You found an anomaly—an artifact with gold before metals were smelted, with Ancient Greek writing, buried where it shouldn’t have been. Doesn’t it make more sense that the radiocarbon dating is wrong, rather than everything we know about Ancient History?” Lady Elliot lifted her glass to her lips, sipping her champagne.
It was the same question I always got. The one from my very first class. The one Dr. St. John asked, and the one my former advisor asked as well.
“It’s not my place to rewrite history. It’s only my place to present what I find. The simplest explanation is generally the correct one, but what I found wasn’t simple at all. So I give you the facts, and people draw their own conclusions.” My face was warm, not from embarrassment. I’d been under more direct questioning, laced with a lot more vitriol, than Lady Elliot’s, but feeling everyone’s eyes on me, waiting—or worse—pitying me, made me want to disappear. “It’s why finding more is so important.”
“But unlikely. If you found it here, say—in the collection brought by some Holy Roman Crusader—that would work against you. And since humans didn’t migrate away from the continent of Africa until well after what your dating is suggesting—it would disprove everything.” Lady and Lord Elliot were much more than they appeared.
Dr. Merton had led me—or had been led to believe—they were interested in furthering my work, but I doubted it. If anything—they were looking for a way to prove all my research, my work, my discoveries, were bullshit.
But the thing was—I wasn’t talking out of my ass when I said I let the facts speak for themselves.
“You can’t believe the gods were real.” Lord Elliot smiled at his wife, who grinned back.
It always came back to this. “You’re so familiar with my work.” I tried not to sound sarcastic, but it was tough. “What paper are you referencing where I theorize a pottery shard was proof of the Greek pantheon? You’ll have to enlighten me, because for the life of me, I can’t remember writing anywhere I had proof Zeus existed.”
“You state that this pottery shard proved Hector was reborn after the Trojan War. Who else would have raised him from the dead? I’m simply putting two and two together to come up with four.”
Oh, Lady Elliot.If there was one thing I could do, it was quote myself. She had no idea how many times I—and my peers— read through my papers before they were published.
“No, I didn’t.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Yes, you did. Something to effect, it wasn’t Hector’s fate to be killed by Achilles, but to become the father of a murdered son…” She trailed off, gaze cutting to her husband.
“Yes. I did say that. Because that is what it says on the artifact. At no time do I suggest Hector was raised from the dead, and I certainly never stated it was done by a god.” The waiter arrived,finally,with my coke. I accepted it, took a sip, and waited for her to respond. I couldn’t turn on my heel and leave, as much as I might want to. Academic Survival 101:don’t get misquoted,anddon’t fail to leave your detractors in a puddle of self-doubt.
I could see when it happened. The moment Lord and Lady Elliot realized I had the upper hand. Yes, there were others like them here at the party. People who wanted to donate money and support an interest. But most of the guests were faculty—people just like me who defended positions their entire life.