A clean retreat shows which claim carried the weight

A passage from a novel, chosen for the method it shows. The data in the story are invented, so what travels is the move and not the result. What it does not establish is set out below.

"The orientation shift is real," she said. "I don't doubt the data — Egyptology's documented shifts in tomb alignment for over a century, it's not obscure, it's in every serious survey of the pre-dynastic cemeteries. What isn't in any of those surveys is a magnetic cause. Burial orientation changes for ordinary reasons — local custom, which way the river runs, what a community believed about the sun and the dead — and at the date you're naming there is no writing to tell us which one it was. I'll grant you that: there's no text to point to. But no text isn't a point for your side. A shift we can see and a cause we can't document is an open question, not a magnetic one. You don't need a pole to move for a custom to change, and you've handed an undocumented custom a much larger explanation than it has earned."

Heath took that the way he took every hit that actually landed — without flinching, and without conceding more than the specific ground she'd taken. "Fair. The date's not load-bearing. Strike the six thousand years if you want it struck." He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn, unhurried. "But the shift itself is still real, and a culture that changes its burial orientation because its people changed their minds about the sky is still a culture that was, at minimum, paying very close attention to the sky in the first place. I don't need their calendar to be right. I only need them to have been watching."

It was, Heath thought, a clean retreat — the kind that gave up exactly enough ground to look honest and kept everything actually worth keeping — and he watched it land around the table in two entirely different ways.

And Bram's verdict, next chapter:

He did not believe the pyramids. He wanted that clear, at least to himself, logged somewhere even if only in his own head — the orientation data was real, Amaleto's rebuttal was better than real, it was enough, and a claim with no better footing than an undocumented custom was a claim he had no obligation to keep carrying.