Dear Robert (if I may),
Thanks for your thoughtful interaction with my blog comments. I think we can probably all agree (if we lay down our disciplinary preferences/specialities for a moment) that an integrated approach is necessary for dealing with this complex corpus, and I appreciate your push in this direction. I would also agree that--in principle--no one data set or discipline should a priori be prioritized in a hierarchy above another, and none of our historical disciplines can achieve that highest-level, reproducible objectivity you talked about. At the same time, not all data sets and methods are equally well-suited to answering every question, and an integrated approach needs to delineate how exactly these methods relate to most effectively answer the dating question. No doubt your research is already attempting to provide that answer, but it seems to me like a method that builds on what can be most confidently known and what is most chronologically indicative is eventually going to need to weight the various data sets and methods differently.
Dear Robert (if I may),
Thanks for your thoughtful interaction with my blog comments. I think we can probably all agree (if we lay down our disciplinary preferences/specialities for a moment) that an integrated approach is necessary for dealing with this complex corpus, and I appreciate your push in this direction. I would also agree that--in principle--no one data set or discipline should a priori be prioritized in a hierarchy above another, and none of our historical disciplines can achieve that highest-level, reproducible objectivity you talked about. At the same time, not all data sets and methods are equally well-suited to answering every question, and an integrated approach needs to delineate how exactly these methods relate to most effectively answer the dating question. No doubt your research is already attempting to provide that answer, but it seems to me like a method that builds on what can be most confidently known and what is most chronologically indicative is eventually going to need to weight the various data sets and methods differently.