The practice of turning a criticism of a hypothesis into a negation seems to be a favourite with self-styled ‘experts’.

There seems to be a failure to consider that we’re dealing with people, and that people sometimes do strange things - they also make mistakes. Clearly, when such occurs, it might be difficult to prove certain hypotheses.

The stand is that if people in the past failed to do what such ‘experts’ expect them to have done then they couldn’t have done what they actually did! Unfortunately, this stand is taken not only by archaeologists and other academics but also by some people on this forum.

Admittedly, the criticism here makes the OCT hypothesis appear to be strange, but people do stranger things than that (in the view of others / outsiders).

The physical context falls within the purview of 'hard' science, the intellectual context lies in the purview of 'soft' science. People may not like it, but that's the way it is.

The hard science approach to OCT might be that it's wrong (because it's the wrong way up), the soft science approach is likely to be, 'why might this have been done?' or 'what might be the consequences of this having happened?' Archaeologists pick and choose when they wish to adopt one approach or the other.

This may reflect where archaeology sits within most universities: it's often in the humanities, but it relies much on hard science, though its interpretation is frequently drawn from soft science. Some institutions have history overlapping the social sciences (it's taught in both), but there would probably be a stronger case for archaeology to be so positioned.

Perhaps archaeo-astronomy might also benefit from this!