First Person: Weighing the Evidence

006

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This aphorism is often chanted by those who challenge a conclusion based on the absence of evidence.

Let’s get right down to cases. In our July/August 1998 issue (see “It’s Not There: Archaeology Proves a Negative,” BAR 24:04), Margreet Steiner argues that there was no city of Jerusalem at the time King David supposedly conquered it. One of her bases for this conclusion is the absence of evidence. As she put it, “Negative evidence is sometimes just that: evidence that there was no settlement.”

Jane Cahill, responding in the same issue, says that the sparse remains “are merely negative features of the archaeological record; they are not negative evidence, that is, they are not ‘evidence that there was no settlement.’”

In a letter to the editor published in the November/December 1998 issue (see Queries & Comments, BAR 24:06), Professor Kenneth Mull, quoting the “basic principle that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,’” writes that Dr. Steiner’s argument is a “wonderful example” of the “misuse of negative data.”

Who’s right? Answer: It all depends. Nothing, it seems, is as simple as it seems. But in this field we must learn to live with complexity as well as uncertainty.

Sometimes the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, sometimes it is. It all depends on the extent to which the evidence would logically be expectable.Determining this, unfortunately, is usually complicated and uncertain. Let’s return to the example of Canaanite (Late Bronze Age) Jerusalem: How expectable is it that we would find the archaeological evidence that we didn’t find?

The answer to that question determines whether the absence of this evidence is evidence of absence. Dr. Steiner’s argument is that, given the amount of digging in Jerusalem, evidence of Canaanite Jerusalem would be very expectable if there were a city there at the time. The answer to her argument is that there may be other reasons why we have not found more evidence of the Late Bronze Age city.

* * * *

Common sense. That’s not something you hear much about in scholarly archaeological literature. Maybe that’s why it’s so often missing. There’s a good Yiddish word for it: saychel. Use a little saychel, my father used to tell me. Use a little good common sense.

That’s what Professor William Schniedewind used in a letter to the editor in our November/December 1998 issue (see Queries & Comments, BAR 24:06). Does it make any sense, he asks, to suppose that Jerusalem—“one of the best naturally defensible positions in all the hill country … [with] excellent agricultural lands nearby, as well as pastoral area … [and] the Gihon Spring”—was abandoned in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age I (half a millennium!). Hardly likely.

* * * *

In a court of law, the government must prove its contention beyond a reasonable doubt before we send a person to jail. In a civil case, the plaintiff must prove his or her case by a preponderance of the evidence before 062we require the defendant to pay money.

But we can seldom reach this level of proof with regard to ancient history because we are dependent on archaeology and ancient texts. If you are looking for certainty, better pursue other disciplines. You can try modern history for a start, but even there, the historian must often settle for something less than what is required in a court of law.

In ancient history, plausibility is often the most we can expect. And we must learn to live with the uncertainty that that implies.

Another difference: In a court of law, we exclude a lot of evidence because it is not dependable enough. The chief example is hearsay; another is an implication that is too tenuous. Both are excluded. Not so when we put on the hat of the historian. Then we accept not only hearsay but double and triple hearsay—what so-and-so told so-and-so, who told it to so-and-so—and worse. The student of ancient history will consider—and treasure—any statement. He or she will try to squeeze all plausible implications from it.

Which brings up a final difference. In a court of law, the lawyer can frame any question of the witness that is relevant to the issue, so long as the answer would be admissible in evidence. The ancient witnesses that the historian can call, by contrast, are ornery beyond words. We cannot frame questions at all. We can only puzzle over what the witness delphically supplies, regardless of how opaque or ambiguous or tenuously related to the subject at hand.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This aphorism is often chanted by those who challenge a conclusion based on the absence of evidence. Let’s get right down to cases. In our July/August 1998 issue (see “It’s Not There: Archaeology Proves a Negative,” BAR 24:04), Margreet Steiner argues that there was no city of Jerusalem at the time King David supposedly conquered it. One of her bases for this conclusion is the absence of evidence. As she put it, “Negative evidence is sometimes just that: evidence that there was no settlement.” Jane Cahill, responding in the same issue, […]