It's probably my thread from yesterday you're referring to. There's a pretty big divide here between what archaeologists/anthropologists say to the public and

It's probably my thread from yesterday you're referring to. There's a pretty big divide here between what archaeologists/anthropologists say to the public and how they interact within their communities. There's a lot of reasons for this that I'm more than happy to go into (e.g. preventing looting, caution about the use of our works to justify bigotry, or simply because there's a lot we don't know). This essentially manifests as "the safest thing to communicate is the basic consensus." It's also the easiest thing to provide layperson accessible resources for. Internally though, the fields are quite aggressive about challenging popular narratives. That's pretty much the best way to make a name as a young researcher and grad classes tend to settle into a debate format, where you take turns trying to rip (sometimes each other's) arguments apart. Secondly, if we're going to point out issues in an entire field, it helps to be specific. No one can actually respond to the assertion that "archaeologists don't talk about things I haven't named." Like, do I list a bunch of things that have been rewritten over time? Finally, archaeology is hard and the record just doesn't answer a lot of the questions we want it to. The field as a whole is moving back from resolving big questions and producing grand narratives to answering little questions and small narratives the record allows us to support. These aren't the things the public asks about, so there's quite a large gap mostly filled by the kind of people too ignorant to realize why there's a gap. The challenge that we need to do a better job filling it was Jared Diamond's most interesting idea, in my opinion.