13th May 2007, 01:13 PM
I'm astonished a historian would say "the records can't lie". It's one of the fundamental problems with documents, trying to assess how far the writer had a particular agenda, the political context etc. In any case, a historian should be excited to have a new perspective on something. I think the integrative approach is best but I suspect there's a degree of snobbery involved for some historians, a desire not to lose the 'upper hand'. I recently came across a problem highlighted by arkies about the movement of pottery (Mississippian) that completely contradicted 18thC documentary accounts. I thought this showed a serious problem with the existing literature but was told it was hardly worth bothering about, which was really disappointing.