[AlbertCory]

Heh. Yes. Like "three of the Gospels were derived from a lost document called 'Q' "

How TF can they prove that to anyone who's not a specialist like them? And how can they ever be sure they're right, barring some new ancient text being discovered?

[sedev]

They can construct various internally-consistent models of what's going on, debate the merits of those models, and check them against the available evidence while doing their best to procure and evaluate new evidence. It's not fundamentally dissimilar from what, say, particle physicists do. The raw materials are different and so the research toolkit necessarily reflects those differences, but serious fields of intellectual inquiry all resemble each other in these fundamental ways.

Since you mentioned Q particularly, I remember the college course in which I learned about it was using Stevan Davies' New Testament Fundamentals, which my college-aged self was able to come to grips with pretty readily. For me that answers the question of "how do they prove that to anyone who's not a specialist" — they can publish a (relatively slim!) undergraduate textbook that incorporates the theory.

[Tims_Account]

Here are a couple of great videos about this topic:

https://youtu.be/b_fcC_fmQqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIctOo6thEc

Tim.

[AlbertCory]

ok, thanks. The difference, though, is that even in astronomy (a non-experimental science) they can always do new observations, more precise ones, different parts of the spectrum, etc. etc. With ancient texts, there's no new data. That's the difference.

I actually hosted Svante Pääbo at Google, and he said that in his youth he was really interested in Egyptology, but then he shifted to recovering ancient DNA. 20 years later he had a reunion with his old Egyptology friends. They were still arguing about the same things.

[whakim]

Archaeology (as well as new technology that allows us to interpret archaeological finds in different/more interesting ways) is constantly providing new data that changes our understanding of the ancient world. To return to the original article, certainly Gibbon was a product of his time and his narrative relies heavily on a number of unsupported biases, but he also didn't have access to the last few hundred years of archaeological evidence which has totally transformed what we know about the Roman Empire.

[AlbertCory]

Hand-waving. Are you seriously comparing "the last few hundred years of archaeological evidence" to the advances made by the Hubble and the James Webb, or other progress in astrophysics in the last 90 years?

They do have a trickle of new information. Gibbon probably IS outdated. But don't try to say that archaeology is anywhere close to other sciences.

[whakim]

I'm not really sure I understand your point - isn't it self-evident that there is new data available to different fields at different rates at different times? And that when there are fewer available data points, each newly available data point has more potential to totally shake up a field? We can quibble over what a "trickle" means, but to use an example from my own graduate research (Chinese Literature), pretty much every piece of scholarly research written a hundred years ago is now considered wrong, totally outdated, or requiring huge caveats. I personally wouldn't call that a trickle.

[AlbertCory]

> fewer available data points

we've probably gone as far as we can go on this.

When you don't have a lot of data, you have to torture what you have more and more. That makes the discipline not "science" but "sciencey." Just like economics is not science but sciencey.