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Originally Posted by August
Now you can perhaps repeat some parts of a historical event to see if something was even possible, Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition for example but that doesn't prove whether ancient South Americans peopled Polynesia.
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Ah, but here you're mistaking repeatability and proof - and therein lies the issue. In this sense natural sciences aren't THAT different - they also build theories based on the best recurring evidence, but repeatability can never be 'proof' unless you have a very narrow positivist mindset. Rather, it can be used to build theories - more or less credible based on accepted methods and observations - but you have to be careful about viewing them as absolute. They are not. Recent advances in theoretical physics alone should be enough of a reminder as to why even the best theories are just that - theories.
So, in that sense, history does much the same, and theorizes based on observed patterns - just that it usually can't be done through experimental methods. However experimental methods are not inherently more 'scientific' and in themselves present a whole slew of methodological issues. Historiography is no less methodical, in that sense, than any other science's approach to gnosiology and epistemology. The emerging methods may be different, but in the end - any science produces theory, not absolute truth.