> Surely "LEAST" would be doing only non-invasive sensing, and rescue digs? Many digs still aren't.
You're nitpicking and you know it.
>> digging test pits and strips, to avoid complete site exposure
> And oh, the care taken when digging and refilling pits, to minimize, for instance, the impact on the site microbiome... err, the site microwhatsit? Picture the careful brain surgeon, picking out his dropped bits of pepperoni and cheese, licking them off his greasy fingers, patting the cranial flap down, and beaming proudly.
This is a shit comparison, and you know it.
> Archeologists celebrating their standard of care... while being largely unfamiliar with even the current states of research in genomics, remote sensing, computer analysis, robotics, and much else, let alone their forseeable futures... Yes, jewler's pics are better than miner's pickaxes, careful troweling than careful dynamiting, and hand-held DLSR visual-light photos better than hand-held sketchbooks... but by how much? Compared to what's coming over the next hundred years?
This part is kinda incomprehensible but it seems like you're being critical of how archaeologists apply innovative tools and methods in their work. You don't know, however, that archaeologists are arguably the most interdisciplinary researchers you can imagine, and use methods from all sorts of other fields to address questions of archaeological concern. There is (in my experience, anyway) lots of care to apply these methods in ways that are ethical, in ways that are respectful towards local communities, and in ways that meet the practical constraints that archaeology faces (rugged terrain, slow pace, low funding, limited timeframe, non-reproducible data collection, coordination of methodologically-diverse projects, etc). No tool is recognized to be useful in its own right, it has to be adapted to suit the circumstances and goals of archaeological projects.