Quote:I haven't studied LBA chronology enough to have an opinion myself, but even James' critics (like the Aegean Dendrochronology Project) seem to agree that Bronze Age archaeologists have to do more absolute dating to test the numbers currently attached to relative dates. Also, Egyptologists seem to have given up using the Sothic cycle to fix some dates in Egyptian history.
I thnk we have two problems here.
One is that archaeology would like to date every find, which they can't for lack of hard datable objects. C14, dendrochronology et al can do a lot, but still leaves gaps. As a result we have to depend for a great deal on interpreting pottery etc., which can be problematic because it's no absolute dating system. And I've come across plenty of 'messy' discussions about such interpretations. Such as how often a cobbled floor had to be renewed - suggestions varied from once every 60 years to once every 6 years! Comparing helmets, swords, buildings and pottery styles is the same as discussing cobbled floors - we DON’T KNOW what the reality behind these perceived systems is. Often enough it’s a mirage based on perceived development. Compare the Deir el Medinah helmet - is it late 3rd c. AD, or late 5th c. AD? Experts disagree.
A related problem is that the Near East has been researched for a good century already and that the reputations of many scholars rest on theories based on ‘petrified’ information. Letting go of some of that information is, as Dan rightly observed, sometimes hard to do.
The second problem is that of historical texts as sources for dating. Especially when evidence is scarce you see that a lot hangs in the balance. Often enough an 'honest' use of some texts would mean that large gaps must fall, and not enough historians are prepared to let go of that context. We MUST discard the evidence of some sources, no matter the results.
But here, too, many theories rest on constructions already made in the 1930s and never changed after that.
The inverted pyramid (pardon the expression) based on the only seemingly consistent chronology (that of Egypt) is immense, but has large gaps. The construction becomes a mix of historical king-lists and attached styles of pottery, weapons, architecture etc., ranging from the Nile to Europe and India. Of course it should be easy to recognize the problems, as I think CoD has done (and Velikovski before them). But on the other hand it’s equally difficult to ‘leave out’ a number of years (which they both did), because this uses the flawed inverted pyramid in the very same manner - they also use the construct of dated textual evidence and archaeological dating systems as if leaving out a certain amount of time would alter anything to the nature of the evidence.
Which it of course doesn’t, because it’s only a new matter of interpreting the same evidence. So far the jury is still out I think, and it will be very interesting where a new consensus ends up.
