Если интересуют именно дискуссии по данному вопросу, то есть вот такая книга, посвященная "мифу Масады": Nachman Ben-Yehuda. Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel. University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
Там этот вопрос рассмотрен довольно подробно на 350 страницах, но не припомню есть ли там дискуссия об археологических данных, насчет решающего штурма. Вот отрывок оттуда:
"Some more questionable and problematic discoveries are the ostraca and the remains of skeletons (twenty-five in one place, others in the lower terrace of the northern palace). Yadin also discovered scrolls, coins, and remnants of armaments. However, the excavations did not uncover the remains of 960 bodies, the identity of the rebels (Sicarii?), the suicide, the lots, the escape from Jerusalem, the length of the siege, or a number of other details. In some other areas, the narrative provided by Josephus Flavius was revealed to be somewhat inaccurate: he missed one palace (the western palace), and his description of the number of towers and the height of the wall are not quite accurate. If Gill's (1993) work is valid, he may have also missed the fact that the siege ramp was built on a natural spur. Although Josephus states that the Sicarii started one big fire on the last night, the excavations revealed many fires. It is important to note all of these points because on page 15 of his 1966 book Yadin writes: "It would be one of the tasks of our archaeological expedition to see what evidence we could find to support the Josephus record."
In view of the myth creation, this sentence appears almost grotesque. Add to this Yadin's statement that "it is not my purpose to offer a dry scientific record; rather it is to enable the reader to share our remarkable experience" and the grotesque becomes even somewhat cynical.
Regardless of this disappointment, the excavations themselves became— through Yadin's efforts—a world-famous enterprise. Volunteers from Israel and abroad flocked to Masada to take part as the diggers of the ancient fortress, and the media in Israel and in England had a field day. It is beyond any doubt that those years in the early 1960s witnessed a peak in the diffusion of the Masada mythical narrative.
According to Tal Ben-Shatz and Yossi Bar-Nachum, the Masada myth was amplified in the daily newspapers, during the early 1960s, for a number of reasons: 1. In a society in which one of the main symbols or cultural codes was the perceived external threat and what its leaders viewed as a struggle for survival, there was a need to educate the masses for heroics and sacrifice. This need most definitely required symbols and myths. The corrected Masada tale fit into this siege and war mentality: "the few against the many"; "Masada shall not fall again" (one can easily replace the word Masada with the word Israel). Israeli society needed a heroic symbol of a fight for national freedom, one that would serve as an antithesis to the nonheroic, passive existence associated with living in the Galut, as well as an antidote to the Holocaust and the view that Jews had been led by the Nazis to be "slaughtered like sheep."
Along the way, we have seen how the Masada mythical narrative was created, maintained, and nourished in different areas of Jewish Israeli culture: textbooks, arts, media, tourism, the Israeli Army, youth movements, prestate underground movements, and so on".
