How can a hypothesis published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal be discredited without its arguments ever being systematically refuted? Eberhard Zangger, president of the Luwian Studies Foundation, explores this question in a new paper published in the journal Scientific Culture.
In his paper, titled “Epistemic Authority and Boundary Work in an Archaeological Controversy: The Troy–Atlantis Case,” Zangger examines how epistemic authority operates, using a controversy that has persisted for more than three decades as a case study. The focus is on his hypothesis, first presented in 1992, that Plato’s account of Atlantis may preserve a distorted historical memory of the Trojan War.
The starting point for the study is an article published in 2018 by the Tübingen-based prehistorian Stephan Blum in an anthology titled Facts and Fictions: Archaeology vs. Pseudoscience. Zangger shows that Blum’s critique fails to consider the relevant scholarly publications on the Troy–Atlantis hypothesis. Instead, it relies on a popular science book from 1992 and repeated references to Wikipedia. The original hypothesis, however, had already been published in 1993 in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology following a year-long peer-review process and has since been further developed in several scholarly publications.
The new paper also documents numerous geoarchaeological findings, historical maps, and indications of possible artificial harbor installations in the plain of Troy. Although such investigations were proposed over 30 years ago, a systematic geophysical survey of the floodplain surrounding Troy’s citadel mound has yet to be conducted. Modern remote sensing techniques could help determine whether extensive Bronze Age settlement and harbor structures lie hidden beneath several meters of sediment.
The study’s central message extends far beyond Troy and Atlantis: Scientific hypotheses should be evaluated on the basis of their methods, findings, and testable predictions – not on the basis of institutional affiliations or reputational judgments. When controversial approaches are excluded from scientific discourse through labeling before they have been empirically tested, scientific authority itself can become an obstacle to new knowledge.
The 20-page, open-access paper was published in Scientific Culture, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2026), pp. 4144–4163.