Who pays for archeologists? Why you do. Most of them are supported by taxes in one form or another. The reason they have too much time on their hands is that they don't have to produce a competitive product to get paid. Sunstone BS doesn't have to be marketable to get the originator paid.
“The reason they have too much time on their hands is that they don’t have to produce a competitive product to get paid.”
That’s not entirely true. They are supported by grants which are competitively awarded against the proposals of others. My problem with archaeologists is that almost all the time the results of their studies are useless. Did a certain dinosaur have feathers, did the vikings use a sunstone? What sort of wood did some extinct indian tribe use to make a spear? Who gives a Cr@p except that it satisfys someones idle curiosity. It has no practical value, and most of the time the conclusions are based on guesswork and speculation.