Picture a scholarly discipline that investigates the past. Practitioners spend a lot of time sifting through the shards of evidence that have survived the ravages of time. Some remnants are numerous; others are rare, available only in remote places. Most challenging are the gaps in the evidentiary record that must be filled by inference. Through painstaking work, scholars arrive at a consensus while discarding earlier inferences that have solidified into myths, obscuring the true picture rather than revealing it.

Such...