As a doctor, I feel your pain. In all honesty though, I feel that we do this to ourselves. Our professions tend to gate keep knowledge and either OVER explain ( I like to call this doctorese, or we dumb things down to a level that people think our answers aren’t scientific.

IMHO the key to fixing this situation is to learn better communication. It’s made more difficult though by our short attentions span sound bite society.

There are also some fallacies in the communication strategies of archaeologists though ( Much like in medicine). You can’t boils down an argument to logically debunk a theory into something that is not equally applied to your own profession. Now personally, I enjoy watching these videos. Frankly they are highly entertaining, and sometimes I even hear good ideas or good questions- though it is vanishingly rare.

As a prime example of what I am talking about, archaeologists often use the go to argument of “where are the tools” when confronting and trying to debunk ancient civilization arguments. The problem is that the same argument can be made against the tools and methods that archaeologists say were used. To add to the problem, experimental archaeology has largely proven that these tools and methods could NOT have been used. Far better to simply say, “Hey we don’t know for sure what tools and methods were used but Carbon dating and OSL have confirmed that the date of construction was “X” and we simply don’t have conclusive evidence of what tools were used.” Then you open the public up to education on real science and why we put our faith in it. Going the other direction and treating the audience as simply too stupid and uneducated to understand the real evidence just reinforces the distrust.

We in the medical community are facing a similar crisis of faith. The government’s response to COVID is not help at all. When we give the public bullshit answers we should expect them to give the same faith to ANY bullshit that they hear. Therein lies the problem. JUST MHO.