> And yet, what is popular dictates what is available for research for the most part. Actually, it doesn't. There's a pretty big disconnect between academic re

> And yet, what is popular dictates what is available for research for the most part. Actually, it doesn't. There's a pretty big disconnect between academic research and popular publication. Partially, this is because popular outreach wins you no plaudits in the academic, but this is also partially because people like media producers are surprisingly unwilling to actually produce shows along the lines of "cool new discoveries in archaeology" and would rather produce tripe that amounts to "ALL ARCHAEOLOGISTS ARE WRONG AND THIS IS WHY IT'S REALLY ANCIENT ALIENS". > in the end we end up concentrating the entire work force of the ancient world on a vanity project (apparently). You do understand that Ancient Egypt had a corvée labor system (i.e., you paid your taxes in labor), and had an environment which meant that most of the inhabited lands were uninhabitable for a while each year (I think it was a month or so, but I don't know the scale of Nile floods for certain)? And we have actual letters from the Old Kingdom of Egypt that talks about managing the corvée labor? > Is it really so outlandish to consider that someone might have been able to make a drill, instead of slogging tens of thousands of man hours on polishing / cutting rock to exact dimensions with primitive techniques? When there is lots of evidence for the feasibility of the latter, and there is not only no evidence of the former, there is also a conspicuous lack of evidence for precursor technological steps, yes, it is outlandish. It's suggesting that comparatively advanced technology shows up out of nowhere, is used for one specific thing and nothing else, and vanishes without a trace; it should be unsurprising that proponents of these theories are also big fans of proposing that it was instead done by aliens (or Atlanteans).