Re: Irony and Understanding

How do archeologists find out the territorial extent of Islam without any chronicle (Muslim or non-Muslim) telling them? What do they do with the buried remains of a town to determine that?

You seem to take my scepticism about historical evidence as an inability to believe anything from historical sources. I just do not believe we are at the point in time where all the relevant information from all the sciences enables us accurately to determine what exactly happened and how people behaved, particularly further back than a few centuries and even more so before writing was available to many. I particularly do not trust religious sources since there appears to be much revision and there is no evidence that bias did not play a large role in what was written. Are we really to see such material as unbiased and truthful accounts? As today, much of what passes from the past to the present as historical evidence had an agenda.