When you deal with ancient history you’re going to end up with at least some imaginings to connect the data points into a narrative of some sort. That narrative

When you deal with ancient history you’re going to end up with at least some imaginings to connect the data points into a narrative of some sort. That narrative will almost certainly be wrong in some significant way given the future discoveries not yet seen. Moreover measuring which imagining is more true requires speculative criteria building speculation on top of speculation. I get religious belief, I am very religious, but to hold that an assortment of artifacts, which are still being discovered, unevenly spread by luck and chance, to hold that that proves or disproves a narrative is a leap of faith. But aside from all that, there’s a common pattern in historical research when there is a looming central question at the center of a field, historiography swings one way heavily, then swings the other way as the excesses of the previous generation are denounced, then there is an attempt to meet in the middle, again denouncing past excesses, then the middle is seen as too wish-washy and full of false equivalence and historiography swings hard in one direction again. For other examples of this see the history of the Cold War, history of world war 2, history of the US Civil War etc.