[exoverito]

As Feynman once remarked, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Archaeology is a soft science at best and highly dependent on interpretation. Given the replication crises afflicting even hard sciences like medicine, we should be skeptical about the claims of any given researcher. And while a domain expert may be more likely to be correct than a layman, their overall probability of being correct may be less than chance, as in the case of pre-industrial doctors.

[AlotOfReading]

I assure you that there's no replication crisis in archaeology. Why? Because almost nothing in archaeology uses replication. You can't excavate the same sections twice, you can't test the same samples twice, and you can't replicate the same historical events to test theories of formation processes.

Archaeology is a historical science like evolutionary biology and geology.

[therealdrag0]

Another thread posted an example where for over a hundred years a Swedish skeleton was thought to be male because it was buried with weapons, but then just a decade ago it was found by DNA evidence to be female.

Surely bone anatomy is much more reliable to interpret than a half million year old pile of sticks yet it was still gotten wrong. Anything that needs interpreted will invite incorrect interpretations and should be taken with a grain of salt.