I am only partially qualified in that I am not a professional archeologist, but I have done post-doctoral archeological studies and have read enough archeological studies to understand the larger academic context.
It is not possible to present all the data informing a judgment in such a short work. Even in a book, it would not be possible. Thus it is common in archeology for papers to be written as part of an ongoing conversation / debate with the community - which would be defined as the small handful of other archeologists doing serious research on the same specific subject matter.
Part of that context here is that these tombs are well-established to be the royal tombs of Alexander's family, spanning a few generations including his father and his son. This is one of the most heavily studied sites in Greece for obvious reasons, and that is not something anybody is trying to prove.
In that context, his arguments are trying to identify any body as one among millions, but as one among a small handful of under ten possibilities.
At the same time, the fact that he is not a native English speaker and general archeological style come into play. For example:
"the painter must have watched a Persian gazelle in Persia, since he painted it so naturalistically (contra Brecoulaki Citation2006). So the painter of Tomb II has to be Philoxenus of Eretria" sounds like a massive leap, and it is. He continues:
"... Tomb I (Tomb of Persephone) must have been painted hastily by Nicomachus of Thebes (Andronikos Citation1984; Borza Citation1987; Brecoulaki et al. Citation2023, 100), who was a very fast painter (Saatsoglou-Paliadeli Citation2011, 286) and was famous for painting the Rape of Persephone (Pliny, N. H. 35.108–109), perhaps that of Tomb I."
Another huge leap, both 'presented as conclusions'. However he then continues to indicate these are just hypotheses: "These hypotheses are consistent with the dates of the tombs..."
So his English language use of presenting things factually does not indicate certainty in the way the words would be used in everyday speech. He seems to perhaps misunderstand the force of the terms, but also appears to be working within the context of the conversation with other archeologists I mentioned to start: They all know every affirmation is as "probably", rarely anything more. So it is relatively common shorthand of the craft in that sense.
I believe you are overthinking his responses to other authors, although I understand the culture shock. It is an ongoing conversation and archeologists tend to be blunt in their assessments. Add Greek bluntness on top of this, and it does not seem to matter to the material.
As to your last question, is this legitimate research? The answer overall appears to be yes, although I could see several points (such as the identification of artists I quoted above, and various items I noticed), which I would never have put into ink the way he did. Still, most of his arguments are compelling. It is a shame that the aggressiveness of a few affirmations detract from the overall value of his work. Archeology is not code nor is it physics. It does not pursue universal truths that are more easy to verify through repeated experiments, but unique historical ones which necessarily attempt to interweave physical details and ancient historical records. Each field has its own level of certainty, and the fact that we cannot establish these details with the same certainty as we can establish the chemical formula for water does not make them useless, or pure inventions. Far from it.
I really don’t know why I stumbled into the comments section on this particular article, but while I’m here I have to commend you on writing perhaps the most thoughtful and eloquent comment I have ever read on HN.
There are some curious inclusions on that page, but the context link reveals that some highlights really aren't the comment, rather the discussion that it triggered.
A "35 child comments" note or similar alongside the highlighted comments might encourage more browsing.
Indeed, but after scanning this article that pulls in all those pieces of indirect evidence I wondered whether some type of structured knowledge database (that encodes the innumerable pieces of historical information that are known, tags them with confidence levels etc.) would not be useful to advance research in such domains.
Something like a large collection of RDF triplets against which you could run a query like "Given this new data point how (more)likely that Alexander the Great's tunic is identified in a royal tomb at Vergina?"
To me it sounds like it could (and likely would) backfire, by replacing judgment with numbers. Who is giving the confidence score? What confidence score does each confidence score receive? Why are those scores more valid than the expert in that very narrow domain? If that expert is the one giving the scores, are they not just gatekeeping? Et cetera. I don't want to see researchers rewriting their papers because their cumulative source score is 68.17, and it should be 72.5 or higher.
also, there have been points in time where established archeology was wrong, and this seems like it would produce a bias towards what we currently think is true.
for example, theories on how the Polynesian migration came to be are still in flux, to the point where one theory was attempted to be proven by actually sailing to the different islands using only traditional wayfinding.
I would phrase it otherwise: supporting judgement with numbers. Its not about altering conclusions, but making more transparent the factual basis and associated reasoning from which they are derived.
The analogy would be trying some exotic food and having a list of ingredients. Yes, good to listen to a local as to how it tastes (and whether it cures all diseases), but if the indication is: 50% sugar, thats a data point worth knowing.
I think that, effectively, the corpus of research papers and citation links is this knowledge database. It isn't structured the way I would structure it in postgres but it seems to be working quite well for the professionals in this field.
I know there have been some interesting finds when an archeologist has dug up a site report from the 1840s that had long laid ignored by academia but these are quite rare occurrences and the scale of people involved here (when we're talking about something hyper specific) is so small that they can probably just sort it out by talking to one another.
For the outside public such a neatly tagged database might be helpful if someone outside of the circle wants to independently research a subject in depth but, honestly, these folks are pretty open to questions and discussions so if you're extremely interested in Gobekli Tepe or some such there's someone out there who is happy to start a conversation with you.
> the corpus of research papers and citation links is this knowledge database
yes, I think so too. In the typical fashion of "pre-digital" information management systems it is extremely economical in the way it encodes things, with statements like "X is true as shown \cite{Y}" etc. But...
> but it seems to be working quite well for the professionals in this field
what prompted my comment is exactly the fact that didn't seem to work that well in this case :-) (nb: I am not remotely an archeology boffin, just triggered by the adversarial language of the paper).
In more quantitative fields people talk about reproducible research, here its more a question of whether similar fields would benefit from "reproducible chains of reasoning".
> it seems to be working quite well for the professionals in this field
That is the universal response to new technology: What we're doing is working fine! What they are saying is, 'everything we've accomplished has been with the old technology'.
I promise that was heard from engineers and architects encountering CAD, from cavalry asked to give up their horses (the conservative urge is so great, many died charging machine guns!), by literary scholars presented with computerized tools, .... it's always the same. One person who installed the first email systems for many businesses told me that, over and over, people would say 'our paper memos work fine - this is just technology for technology sake'. They meant, 'everything we've accomplished, we've done it with paper memos'.
New technology lets you do old things much faster and/or lets you do new things you couldn't do before - new things you didn't dream of doing, and as people discover uses for it, new things you won't know about for years.
And the universal argument that people pushing tech are making boils down to 'I don't understand your field, or the particular needs of it, but I'd like to sell you a process that I invented. I'm not going to be held responsible for any bad consequences of you adopting it.'
Unsurprisingly, people tend to resist this sort of thing.
Sometimes the local maximum people are stuck in sucks, and they need a shakeup.
That shakeup will not be well received when it comes from a complete stranger, who has no rapport with the community, with zero skin in the game.
> So his English language use of presenting things factually does not indicate certainty in the way the words would be used in everyday speech. He seems to perhaps misunderstand the force of the terms
He might or might not. It's also possible that academic practice in his native language is to use terms of equivalent force.
Of course, if somebody was studied in archeology and the Greek language, and had read and was friends with a variety of Greek and many other ESL scholars working in the field, perhaps their comments would hold more weight than total speculation. Despite all the contextual clues, since the words are there as they were written, I cannot state for a fact he did not intend for them to come across exactly they way they do to the ever-so-elusive "reasonable native English speaker".
That's not what I was saying. The words have a certain force by definition. The way they're used is a separate concern; it's possible that in another language, the correct academic practice is to use words indicating certainty while it's just understood that the certainty isn't really present. In such a case, he might accurately understand what the English words he's using mean - they convey total certainty - without understanding that English speakers will interpret them as conveying total certainty.
The force with which you express disagreement is also a general cultural issue. In some cultures, disagreement is expressed as indirectly as possible; in others, nobody really thinks you're actually disagreeing unless you're practically shouting (or so I was given to understand by Russian colleagues). And English lies somewhere in the middle, where you're expected to express your disagreement politely (while framing your obvious scathing contempt in ambiguous Jane-Austen-like wordplay).
I am only partially qualified in that I am not a professional archeologist, but I have done post-doctoral archeological studies and have read enough archeological studies to understand the larger academic context.
It is not possible to present all the data informing a judgment in such a short work. Even in a book, it would not be possible. Thus it is common in archeology for papers to be written as part of an ongoing conversation / debate with the community - which would be defined as the small handful of other archeologists doing serious research on the same specific subject matter.
Part of that context here is that these tombs are well-established to be the royal tombs of Alexander's family, spanning a few generations including his father and his son. This is one of the most heavily studied sites in Greece for obvious reasons, and that is not something anybody is trying to prove.
In that context, his arguments are trying to identify any body as one among millions, but as one among a small handful of under ten possibilities.
At the same time, the fact that he is not a native English speaker and general archeological style come into play. For example:
"the painter must have watched a Persian gazelle in Persia, since he painted it so naturalistically (contra Brecoulaki Citation2006). So the painter of Tomb II has to be Philoxenus of Eretria" sounds like a massive leap, and it is. He continues:
"... Tomb I (Tomb of Persephone) must have been painted hastily by Nicomachus of Thebes (Andronikos Citation1984; Borza Citation1987; Brecoulaki et al. Citation2023, 100), who was a very fast painter (Saatsoglou-Paliadeli Citation2011, 286) and was famous for painting the Rape of Persephone (Pliny, N. H. 35.108–109), perhaps that of Tomb I."
Another huge leap, both 'presented as conclusions'. However he then continues to indicate these are just hypotheses: "These hypotheses are consistent with the dates of the tombs..."
So his English language use of presenting things factually does not indicate certainty in the way the words would be used in everyday speech. He seems to perhaps misunderstand the force of the terms, but also appears to be working within the context of the conversation with other archeologists I mentioned to start: They all know every affirmation is as "probably", rarely anything more. So it is relatively common shorthand of the craft in that sense.
I believe you are overthinking his responses to other authors, although I understand the culture shock. It is an ongoing conversation and archeologists tend to be blunt in their assessments. Add Greek bluntness on top of this, and it does not seem to matter to the material.
As to your last question, is this legitimate research? The answer overall appears to be yes, although I could see several points (such as the identification of artists I quoted above, and various items I noticed), which I would never have put into ink the way he did. Still, most of his arguments are compelling. It is a shame that the aggressiveness of a few affirmations detract from the overall value of his work. Archeology is not code nor is it physics. It does not pursue universal truths that are more easy to verify through repeated experiments, but unique historical ones which necessarily attempt to interweave physical details and ancient historical records. Each field has its own level of certainty, and the fact that we cannot establish these details with the same certainty as we can establish the chemical formula for water does not make them useless, or pure inventions. Far from it.