These memoir pieces circle around ancient difficulties, and refuse to move on.
It is known that analyzing DNA from ancient samples causes difficulties either because of DNA degradation or contamination by contemporary DNA.
Most studies of ancient binders acknowledge considerable difficulties in accurate identification due to the degradation of the original compounds, the mixture and interaction of materials present in the preparation, paint and protective layers, and the small sample size [25 27].
Aristotle, another ancient philosopher complained, "surrounds the difficulty of his subject with the obscurity of his language, and thus avoids refutation — producing darkness, like a squid, in order to make himself hard to capture".
This illustrates the difficulty of inferring ancient stoneworkers' design intentions from narrowly-defined optimal values.
These factors might be related both to the difficulty in extracting ancient paint media and the influence of biological contamination.
These factors could be related to the difficulty of extracting ancient paint media as well as to the influence of microbiological contamination.
The difficulty in extracting ancient paint media and its possible influence in the analytical results suggests that this issue should be taken into full account when characterizing ancient painting techniques.
As the paint used in sculpture requires an organic binder to fix the pigments to the support, the lack of identification of organic binders has to be ascribed to the use of a fresco painting technique, and may instead be taken as proof of the difficulty to characterize ancient paint media.
There are many difficulties in interpreting ancient medical writings, and the descriptive terms used by ancient authors for clinical conditions are often misleading.
