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You must have missed that I didn't say other forms of history were NOT tenuous. But they're not all equal, either. > You use what's useful for the questions yo

You must have missed that I didn't say other forms of history were NOT tenuous. But they're not all equal, either. > You use what's useful for the questions you're researching indeed. However, usefulness depends on how reliable that particular piece of evidence is.

AlotOfReading 2y ago
The idea of "equality" doesn't really apply here. They're simply different kinds of data. If you want to research ancient near eastern "Social history" (term of art), looking at stelae and king lists is not going to be particularly helpful. If you want to look at classical pan-hellenic identity, looking at the primarily attic corpus we have today is again not the best source of information. Material culture is often significantly less affected by these innate, unavoidable authorship biases because it's typically looking at the unconscious habits of statistically significant numbers of people. You specifically called out the issue of researcher interpretation though. Although the mosaic authorship issue illustrates how severe this problem is in literary analysis, it is a fundamental issue in archaeological work as well. You might not know this, but there was a movement in archaeology to completely eliminate any need for "interpretation" called processualism. This movement is generally considered a failure today, in large part because it was realized that the issue of interpretation is fundamental to all historical research. It's not a "better or worse", it's "every type of source will have all the same issues and we have no choice but to confront them". Modern archaeologists are generally two generations beyond this into a sort of ambiguous modern synthesis, to borrow the term from biology.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  You clearly know more about this than I do. I have a generally low opinion of "modern" approaches that care more about "equity" than "truth." So maybe we should just stop here.

AlotOfReading 2y ago

The idea of "equality" doesn't really apply here. They're simply different kinds of data. If you want to research ancient near eastern "Social history" (term of art), looking at stelae and king lists is not going to be particularly helpful. If you want to look at classical pan-hellenic identity, looking at the primarily attic corpus we have today is again not the best source of information. Material culture is often significantly less affected by these innate, unavoidable authorship biases because it's typically looking at the unconscious habits of statistically significant numbers of people. You specifically called out the issue of researcher interpretation though. Although the mosaic authorship issue illustrates how severe this problem is in literary analysis, it is a fundamental issue in archaeological work as well. You might not know this, but there was a movement in archaeology to completely eliminate any need for "interpretation" called processualism. This movement is generally considered a failure today, in large part because it was realized that the issue of interpretation is fundamental to all historical research. It's not a "better or worse", it's "every type of source will have all the same issues and we have no choice but to confront them". Modern archaeologists are generally two generations beyond this into a sort of ambiguous modern synthesis, to borrow the term from biology.

AlbertCory 2y ago
You clearly know more about this than I do. I have a generally low opinion of "modern" approaches that care more about "equity" than "truth." So maybe we should just stop here.