Um... it also applies to the very earliest archeological expeditions that were cherry picked and faked to epic proportions by the elites at the time. Seriously faked.
I doubt if any of those early archaeologists really thought of themselves as fraudsters.
Most simply had preconceived notions about what they would find, notions based on ancient texts, and then matched what they found to those texts.
Real science, with it's full panoply of C.S.I. type of analyses, took many years to develop.