I am going to play the devil's advocate here.
As I see it the main flaw of archaeology to reconstruct history is that very little from the distant past actually get preserved in the archaeological record. A good analogue would be trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with only some of the pictures, what you get is a incomplete picture.
To use an example in Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars, there is a record migration of a tribe called the Helvetti which even accounting for overestimation in numbers, was many thousands of people. However the archaeological evidence for this migration is nil. The same scant archaeological evidence for a lot of mass scale migrations attested in historical writings.
As I see it the main flaw of archaeology to reconstruct history is that very little from the distant past actually get preserved in the archaeological record. A good analogue would be trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with only some of the pictures, what you get is a incomplete picture.
To use an example in Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars, there is a record migration of a tribe called the Helvetti which even accounting for overestimation in numbers, was many thousands of people. However the archaeological evidence for this migration is nil. The same scant archaeological evidence for a lot of mass scale migrations attested in historical writings.
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