Archeology is like arithmetic to historians.
“It is thus relevant that over the past half-century or so, it has so happened that effectively all ancient historians have had to develop a strong grasp of archaeological data; we don’t all necessarily learn to do the excavation work, of course (that’s what archaeologists do), but pretty much all ancient historians at this point are going to have to be able to read a site or artifact report as well as have a good theoretical grasp of what kinds of questions archaeology can be used to answer and how it can be used to answer those questions”
https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/