Wikipedia isn't the forum for any of that. Journals, books, and other literature are the place for discussions about ontology and methodology.

My experience with archaeology is that it's more self critical than you probably expect.

Or maybe you aren’t paranoid enough. Can you hold yourself and you industry up to the same impossible standard?

All high level animals respond to reinforcement learning. They learn by correlation, not causation. It’s ridiculously difficult to confirm causation, period. It’s not limited to academics, WikiPedia, etc.

Based on my strictly amateur readings of research in archaeology and historical anthropology, they’re more contentious than I expected. People who jump to unsupported conclusions draw public criticism. There are many papers along the lines of “paper x is wrong for reasons a, b, and c”.

It’s not math, so it’s not a clean procession of verifiable work, but their scientific method seems to be alive and well.

The public image maybe suffers from earlier (~1900) work, which really does read like “here are some evidence-light ideas that strike me, a philosopher gentleman, as quite plausible”.

The site summarises accounts of individual researchers, most of which are based on interviews with individuals that are by now dead (as is the researcher). You can doubt as much as you want but I don't see the benefit in this - especially as the article doesn't present 'truthc but rather the different viewpoints/interpretations.

I’d call that a reverse cargo cult, if so.