Methodology

Methodology: A Statement of Approach

Purpose

This research draws on three distinct kinds of material, classical and documentary record, tradition, legend, and modern scientific analysis and treats them deliberately as different kinds of evidence, not as a single undifferentiated pool of "sources." This statement sets out how each is used, how they are weighed against one another and how conclusions are drawn from them. It is offered as a preamble to the work as a whole, so that anyone reading it understands the standard being applied throughout, rather than having to infer it piece by piece.

Building the spine

Where hard evidence for a period is thin and for much of pre-Roman and early medieval Britain, it is very thin indeed, the starting point cannot be silence. A working structure has to be built from whatever material exists, including myth, tradition, and unattested sources. This is not a lowering of standards; it is the same process any genuine inquiry follows before it has enough evidence to test anything. A hypothesis must exist in some rough shape before it can be examined, and where the earliest surviving material for a period is legendary, legend is legitimate scaffolding for that first shape. Nothing is dismissed at this stage on the grounds of being unfashionable, unproven, or out of step with current academic opinion.

Deconstruction

Once a spine exists, it is taken apart, deliberately and without sentiment, until only what survives scrutiny remains. Every element of the structure is tested against whatever independent evidence can be brought to bear on it,  documentary, archaeological, genetic, or textual. What holds up stays. What does not is set aside, or held at a lower weight than it was first given. This process is continuous, not a single pass: earlier conclusions are revisited whenever new evidence arrives, including evidence that undermines work already done. Nothing is protected from correction because it was arrived at previously, or because correcting it is inconvenient.

A three-tier framework

Every claim in this research is held at one of three levels, and the distinction between them is maintained consistently:

• Proven, supported by independent, corroborating evidence of a kind that could reasonably be expected to disprove the claim if it were false, and which has not done so.

• Strong circumstantial, supported by a genuine pattern of evidence that falls short of proof, but which is not merely coincidence or wishful reading.

• Working hypothesis,  a proposed connection or reading that is coherent and worth holding, but currently rests on too little independent support to be called more than a possibility.

"Argued" and "established" are kept as distinct categories throughout. A claim does not migrate from one tier to the other simply through repetition, confidence of phrasing, or the passage of time in the historiography.

Classical and documentary sources

Primary classical texts, Caesar, Tacitus, Ptolemy, Diodorus, are used as historical evidence, but not treated as neutral or unbiased simply because they are ancient. Every ancient author wrote for a purpose, often a political one, and their claims are weighed accordingly: what can be checked against independent corroboration (archaeology, epigraphy, a second unconnected source) is given more weight than what cannot. Proximity to events and the existence of independent physical evidence that could confirm or contradict a claim, matter more than an author's reputation for honesty, which in most cases cannot be assessed at all.

Tradition and legend

Traditional and legendary material, medieval chronicles, Welsh Triadic and bardic sources, antiquarian folklore collections, is not treated as either fact or as worthless. It is read for what it is: material that may preserve a genuine older memory, may reflect a later author's invention, or may be some blend of both, and which usually cannot be sorted into those categories without independent corroboration. Legendary material is retained deliberately, not despite being unattested but because, for many periods, it is the only continuous narrative that survives and because a pattern that recurs independently across more than one tradition, or that consistently lands on genuinely significant real geography, is itself worth noting, even when no single strand of it can be called evidence on its own.

Antiquarian and secondary sources

Older antiquarian writers worked with the tools and the corpus of evidence available in their own time, which in most cases was far more limited than what exists now. Their conclusions are not dismissed on the strength of their author's later reputation, nor accepted on it. Each specific claim is checked, where possible, against evidence that has become available since, dating methods, genetic analysis, digitised manuscript corpora, cross-referenced scholarship, that the original writer simply did not have access to. A source found to be unreliable in one respect is not assumed unreliable in every respect, and a source's overall standing in current academic opinion is not treated as a verdict on any individual claim it contains.

A clear distinction is maintained, however, between an honest error of interpretation and a documented act of fabrication. A writer working in good faith from incomplete or badly-understood material may still preserve a genuine underlying fact inside a mistaken conclusion and such claims are worth testing individually rather than discarding wholesale. A text known to have been deliberately invented and presented as older or more authentic than it is belongs to a different category: what is true within it is true only by coincidence, not because the source preserved it and it cannot be treated as evidence for anything beyond its own existence as an artefact.

Corroboration as the deciding tool

Where more than one explanation is consistent with the same evidence, corroboration, an independent source, a different discipline, a physically constrained method such as isotope or genetic analysis,  is the tool used to distinguish between them. This is not a rejection of open-minded inquiry; it is what makes open-minded inquiry productive rather than directionless. A theory that cannot in principle be tested against anything is not being protected by that quality, it is simply unable to be strengthened either.

On conclusions

Where the evidence supports a clear answer, that answer is stated plainly. Where it does not, the honest gaps are stated just as plainly and are not papered over with confident phrasing or filled in from imagination. A negative or inconclusive result is treated as a legitimate outcome of the work, not a failure of it. Where classical record, tradition, and modern science are found to converge independently on the same geography, period, or claim, that convergence is noted as genuinely significant, while remaining clear that convergence of this kind narrows the space of live possibilities, and is not, by itself, proof of any single one of them. AJB.c.2026