Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

This article describes the efforts of Josiah Ober and colleagues at Stanford to do more sophisticated data analysis for ancient Greek history. Their project aims to recover how much egalitarian political movements, coming out of the "Dark Ages" of c. 1100 BCE, led to increased wealth, and hence, to cultural efflorescence. One controversial point is whether there are in fact enough data to support their retrojections.

http://chronicle.com/article/Classicist ... gtblFUEg==

The data probably is not there; but attempts to quantify must always be useful. One of the things I loved about T.C.Skeat's papyrology articles was that he always gave numbers and calculated percentages etc.