As folks are generally aware, the amount of historical evidence available to historians decreases the further back you go in history. This has a real impact on how historians are trained; my go-to metaphor in explaining this to students is that a historian of the modern world has to learn how to sip from a firehose of evidence, while the historian of the ancient world must learn how to find water in the desert.
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The big problem with literary evidence is that for the most part, for most ancient societies, it represents a closed corpus: we have about as much of it as we ever will. And what we have isn’t much. The entire corpus of Greek and Latin literature fits in just 523 small volumes. You may find various pictures of libraries and even individuals showing off, for instance, their complete set of Loebs on just a few bookshelves, which represents nearly the entire corpus of ancient Greek and Latin literature (including facing English translation!). While every so often a new papyrus find might add a couple of fragments or very rarely a significant chunk to this corpus, such additions are very rare. The last really full work (although it has gaps) to be added to the canon was Aristotle’s Athenaion Politeia (‘Constitution of the Athenians’) discovered on papyrus in 1879 (other smaller but still important finds, like fragments of Sappho, have turned up as recently as the last decade, but these are often very short fragments).
In practice that means that, if you have a research question, the literary corpus is what it is. You are not likely to benefit from a new fragment or other text ‘turning up’ to help you. The tricky thing is, for a lot of research questions, it is in essence literary evidence or bust. We’ll talk about other kinds of evidence in a second, but for a lot of the things people want to know, our other forms of evidence just aren’t very good at filling in the gaps. Most information about discrete events – battles, wars, individual biographies – are (with some exceptions) literary-or-bust. Likewise, charting complex political systems generally requires literary evidence, as does understanding the philosophy or social values of past societies.
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[A]rcheological evidence is really only able to answer certain specific questions and most research topics are simply not archaeologically visible. If your research question is related to what objects were at a specific place at a given time (objects here being broad; ‘pots’ or ‘houses’ or ‘farms’ or even ‘people’ if you are OK with those people being dead), good news, archaeology can help you (probably). But if your research question does not touch on that, you are mostly out of luck. If your object of study doesn’t leave any archaeological evidence…then it doesn’t leave any evidence. Most plagues, wars, famines, rulers, laws simply do not have archaeologically visible impacts, while social values, opinions, beliefs don’t leave archaeological evidence in any case.
It’s funny, my study of the ancient world has led me to the opposite conclusion. We are currently in a golden age of discovery that is increasing the breath and depth of the historical record from...
It’s funny, my study of the ancient world has led me to the opposite conclusion. We are currently in a golden age of discovery that is increasing the breath and depth of the historical record from every era.
I know it is counter-intuitive, and the reasoning of the author here is sound. My issue is that they are focusing on a single type of scientific method when all the new exciting stuff is happening in fields such as archaeogenetics and LiDar and isotope sampling. These findings may not give you the classical historical profile of kings and battles but what we have learned about ancient economies and demographics and migrations would make earlier generations of historians goggle.
And I’m quite certain I’m right. Running an ancient history channel for the last four years, the engagement and popularity of our videos only went crazy when we started focusing on the new technologies.
Strangely enough, the further forward we go in time, the more we understand about the past.
That's archeology. He does have positive things to say about it: But he's also writing about its limitations and the research questions it doesn't answer if it can't be combined with written records.
That's archeology. He does have positive things to say about it:
Archaeology is wonderful, easily the biggest contributor to the improvement in our knowledge of the ancient world over the last century; my own research relies heavily on archaeological evidence. And the best part of it is we are getting more and better archaeological evidence all the time.
But he's also writing about its limitations and the research questions it doesn't answer if it can't be combined with written records.
I'm reminded of a tale from my father in law, when he was young and was helping in an archelogical dig. Paraphrased: "Hey I found this iron arrowhead." "There isn't supposed to be iron at this...
I'm reminded of a tale from my father in law, when he was young and was helping in an archelogical dig. Paraphrased:
"Hey I found this iron arrowhead."
"There isn't supposed to be iron at this level. You didn't find this. If you did find this, it would possibly invalidate the whole dig and we lose funding."
I don't have the chops to validate whether that's something that can/could/does happen, but if true there's a decent chance that even a good bit of our archelogical evidence is 'bound' by a lot of presumptions.
From the blog post:
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It’s funny, my study of the ancient world has led me to the opposite conclusion. We are currently in a golden age of discovery that is increasing the breath and depth of the historical record from every era.
I know it is counter-intuitive, and the reasoning of the author here is sound. My issue is that they are focusing on a single type of scientific method when all the new exciting stuff is happening in fields such as archaeogenetics and LiDar and isotope sampling. These findings may not give you the classical historical profile of kings and battles but what we have learned about ancient economies and demographics and migrations would make earlier generations of historians goggle.
And I’m quite certain I’m right. Running an ancient history channel for the last four years, the engagement and popularity of our videos only went crazy when we started focusing on the new technologies.
Strangely enough, the further forward we go in time, the more we understand about the past.
That's archeology. He does have positive things to say about it:
But he's also writing about its limitations and the research questions it doesn't answer if it can't be combined with written records.
I'm reminded of a tale from my father in law, when he was young and was helping in an archelogical dig. Paraphrased:
"Hey I found this iron arrowhead."
"There isn't supposed to be iron at this level. You didn't find this. If you did find this, it would possibly invalidate the whole dig and we lose funding."
I don't have the chops to validate whether that's something that can/could/does happen, but if true there's a decent chance that even a good bit of our archelogical evidence is 'bound' by a lot of presumptions.