[betty boop]

So you can separate true accounts from myth, but archaeologists cannot?

Maybe archeologists just need a little more common sense.

[tacticalogic]

Is "common sense" immune to personal and cultural freight?

[general_re]

Let's put in somewhat more direct terms. When I looked outside yesterday, I observed that it was raining. Based on my historical experience that rain will make me wet, I concluded that yesterday was a good day to take the umbrella out of the closet and use it. Now, I have no way of proving that rain will make me wet, without actually going out there - all I have is the available evidence, that every time I've gone out in the rain before, I've gotten wet. But this is a probabilistic argument, not a deductive certainty - because I've always gotten wet before, I conclude that I am likely to get wet again if I go out without my umbrella. Now, even though I have inductively reasoned my conclusion, it's still eminently testable - I can go out without the umbrella, and test my conclusion that standing in the rain with no umbrella will make me wet.

By the same token, even though conclusions about the construction of the pyramids are arrived at inductively, that doesn't mean they aren't testable. After examining the evidence, I conclude that the Egyptians were able to levitate blocks of stone by chanting a particular verse and waving a dead chicken over them. So I chant the chant and wave the dead chicken, and sure enough, they don't levitate. So I've tested my hypothesis and falsified it - even though I wasn't there, I can disprove the chicken chant theory of pyramid origins.

So, maybe I take a closer look at the evidence to formulate another hypothesis about the construction of the pyramids. And given that I find large camp sites near the pyramids, with food storage and bakeries and so forth, large enough to support thousands of men, and that the stones themselves have marks consistent with stoneworking tools, I hypothesize that the pyramids were built over a period of time by many thousands of men, using the tools which we know from excavation were available to them.

But I wasn't there to observe the actual building of the pyramids - can my theories on the construction techniques of the Egyptians be tested? Can we know whether it was possible for them to have built it in the way I hypothesize?

Of course we can...