ranging from pottery and textiles, to tools and weapons. Mommsen encouraged the systematic investigation of these new sources, combined with on-going developments in philology and legal history. Much on-going work was furthering this program: inscriptions were being gathered and authenticated, site work performed at the ruins, and technical examination make of the objects. From a coordinated synthesis of these miscellaneous studies, historical models might be constructed. Such modeling would provide historians with an objective framework independent of the ancient texts, by which to determine their reliability. Information found in the surviving literature then could be for the first time properly scrutinized for its truth value and accordingly appraised. "[T]hrough comparative linguistics, numismatics, and epigraphy, Mommsen was trying to create a body of material which had the status of archival evidence and which would serve as a control on the narratives of historical writers such as Livy and Appian. Their narratives had already been subjected to scrutiny by earlier scholars, of whom the most significant was Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831). ... Niebuhr's method had been to apply the principles of "Source Criticism" to unravel contradictions in the traditional account, and then to explain them by applying models developed in the light of his own experience, e.g., of conscription in a peasant society. Mommsen's work sought to establish entirely new categories of evidence for the use of the historian." The Mommsen's work won immediate, widespread acclaim, but the praise it drew was not unanimous. "While the public welcomed the book with delight and scholars testified to its impeccable erudition, some specialists were annoyed at finding old hypotheses rejected... ." Mommsen omits much of the foundation legends and other tales of early Rome, because he could find no independent evidence to verify them. He thus ignored a scholarly field that was seeking a harmonized view using merely ancient writers. Instead Mommsen's Römische Geschichte presented only events from surviving literature that could be somehow checked against other knownledge gained elsewhere, e.g., from inscriptions, philology, or archaeology. "[The book] astonished and shocked professional scholars by its revolutionary treatment of the misty beginnings of Rome, sweeping away the old legends of the kings and heroes and along with them the elaborate critical structure deduced from those tales by Barthold Niebuhr, whose reputation as the grand master of Roman history was then sacrosanct. It replaced the critical work of Niebuhr with a far more penetrating criticism and