The published cadence is "the text says X; the imagery, survey, and excavation at site Y show Z." Hypotheses come from the corpus; conclusions come from the ground. Belief is not a prerequisite for the corpus to be useful as a source of testable claims — a distinction made carefully by mid-century practitioners on both sides and held by their successors.
Three principles characterise the practice:
- Hypothesis-generation precedes conclusions. A textual claim suggests where to look and what to look for; what can be claimed publicly comes from what the evidence shows.
- Negative results are part of the methodology. A textual claim that does not survive testing against landscape evidence is a genuine result; the discipline does not require every claim to corroborate.
- Calibrated language. "I notice X in the text; the established methodology suggests testing Y; here is what additional sensing would resolve" is defensible. "X means Y" overclaims.
There is documented intellectual lineage in both traditions. The early-20th-century Near Eastern school used scripture as hypothesis-generation extensively in the Levantine field; the Archaeological Survey of India and the satellite-era Sarasvati researchers did the equivalent in the South Asian field. Both lineages continue to debate the boundary in public — sometimes sharply, as in the chronology disputes between the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem schools, or the Aryan-migration arguments in South Asian archaeology — without abandoning the method.