Sachys: That is incredibly ultracrepidarian of you.
You don't have enough knowledge about me to be the judge of that.
No one here should claim he has more knowledge than what you get by visiting dig sites, ancient buildings, museums, reading books and wathing documentaries. My views are as good or bad as yours.
Sachys: The vast majority of archaeology is sifting through old shit pits up to your knees in coprolites.
Castles, villas and temples have VERY LITTLE to do with it - especially as they often still stand and have changed hands more times than can be feasibly counted.
You MIGHT want to read the post again from the beginning to the end and then maybe understand it. There were actually more than two sentences in it.
And I never said it was not hard work (the word "difficult" crosses my mind, I wonder why ...). But all that stuff that's just rotten and gone ... there is just no digging up stuff from the dirt. From the little that's left, one has to immagine how it was back in the days. You can't deny that. Most of the time it's just some pottery and the some tools what's left of the past ages. Most of the rest is just gone. And the past has proven over and over again that the interpretations often were complete bollocks. Often it took many tries until they got it right ... or at least "right" as far as we can tell.
About the "changing hands" aspect: You are absolutely right. We have many such examples here and ever owner tried to leave his mark. Also - if something was in public or church hands - during the past 600 years they documented everything. Who payed how much for buying what from whom, what was the price, if other deals were made, which part of the church was rebuilt when, what was changed. They were very meticulous, THAT is easy to reconstruct - at least for the past 600 years in this region.
Anyway, to get back to the topic: What it really WAS about was that one can easily be mislead by the "big" stuff. Focusing on the stone monuments that are left does not say much about how it really was back then (the pyramids for example: We were lead to believe for millennia that slaves were forced to build them. All of this because of a liberal athenian historian, who lived long after, he just could not immagine it any other way)
All the "proof" for alien visitors ususally turns out to be normal people who were just good at their jobs.