About
Purpose
To assemble, in public and with visible provenance, what is actually known about the world before Abraham — and to keep separate the kinds of knowing involved. Text, archaeology and geology answer different questions with different failure modes. Merging them produces confident narratives that no single line of evidence supports.
This is a project of Old Watchman.
Seven evidence classes
Every observation is filed under exactly one of these. They are not a ranking; they are a statement of what kind of thing the evidence is.
| Class | What it is |
|---|---|
| physical_archaeology | Excavated material, deposits, structures, objects. |
| contemporary_inscription | A text written at the time, on a contemporary object. |
| later_manuscript_copy | A text preserved only in copies made much later. |
| later_historical_tradition | Later writers reporting what they believed happened. |
| modern_scholarly_interpretation | A scholar's reconstruction or synthesis. |
| proposed_identification | A proposed equation — a name with a site, a person with a person — not an established one. |
| speculation | Recorded as speculation, and labelled as such wherever it appears. |
Four gap-aware evidence states
"Not found" is not one thing. A single generic absence hides four very different situations, so the platform distinguishes them everywhere:
Confidence is ordinal, never numeric
No statement in this platform carries a percentage. A number like "72% confident" implies a precision that textual and archaeological evidence cannot supply, and invites false comparisons between incomparable things. Only bands are used, and a non-UNKNOWN confidence cannot be recorded without a written rationale.
Evidence depth
Depth levels 1–4 measure how close a statement is to physical evidence — not how confident we are. A shallow but certain statement and a deep but contested one are different things, and the scale keeps them apart.
What this platform will not do
- Give an unknown location a pin.
- Give an unknown date a point on the timeline.
- Call a missing manuscript an absence.
- Present restored text as preserved.
- Present a translation's wording as the ancient word.
- Display a catalogued-but-unheld source as held evidence.
- Turn a conventional period label into measured dating evidence.
- Rename an excavator's "flood layer" as anyone's Flood.
Corrections stay visible
When this project gets something wrong, the correction is recorded rather than deleted, so the record shows both the error and the repair.
Rights
Public domain and explicitly licensed material is preferred throughout. Copyrighted works are held as metadata and a link only. Where a work is lawfully readable but not openly licensed, that fact is recorded per component — because a permission covering a book's text does not cover its photographs.