Title: Burned, Charred, and Buried: (Re)Engineering the Past

In 1991 Jon Hather cautioned that charred archaeobotanical assemblages are misidentified because of experimental biases. In this Workshop, I’ll argue that Prof Hather – and others – have continued to fuel these biases (pun intended) for one simple reason: they need friends who are fuel scientists. Through this workshop we’ll draw on recent fuel science research to understand the critical differences between charring, burning and carbonization and the perils of using a muffle furnace to represent all of these process. We’ll look at ways to quantify the qualitative observations that are often used to infer a given biomass’ thermal treatment and consider how the methods fuel scientists employ daily could be used to improve archaeobotanical identification.