Mike Burer's blog

The study of antiquities is fascinating business, but it can be quite dangerous because the contemporary scholarly impetus is to fill in the gaps, often with purely hypothetical conclusions, when a wiser path would be to discuss options and then acknowledge that the present state of our knowledge is limited. Scholars tend to say more than can be definitively shown, when a more prudent path would be to present data and be conservative in conclusions.

One thing I have learned in my research is never to ignore the introduction and conclusion to a book. In these places the author will often set out his thesis such that one can have a good framework to approach the details of the argument. (If one is in a hurry and the intro and conclusion are well written, you can simply work with those to get the basic argument of the book.) Gomes in the introduction states fairly clearly what his thesis is: