I've never understood why this topic is being studied primarily through archaeology. There are plenty of humans alive today that live far from much artificial light and could tell you exactly what their life is like right now, what they did last night. Shouldn't have to be so hard / so mysterious
Partially because the humans alive today don't have the same culture as the humans in the past. I'd imagine that a comparison between lit+unlit living today would fall under the umbrella of sociology.
How are you going to contact people who live far from artificial light? Typically that's concomitant with not having electricity needed for internet communications, as that typically prevents powered cell phone internet communication as well.
You could fly then drive there, but the costs are going to add up quickly. You're going to have to find them, get someone to communicate with them, and have liabilities covered. This quickly becomes very expensive with even just a few people.
It's funny, just came back from a trip into the American South West. Stayed at a cabin in the middle of nowhere on a 500 acre ranch surrounded by only the wilderness and other giant ranches...on a new moon.
I've never seen so many stars in my life, even in places I thought of as raw wilderness and I've spent quite a bit of time camping in national parks and so on.
Those places seemed like light filled cities in comparison. It was about a 4 hour drive from the nearest major population center.
I suspect there's plenty of these places still left even in relatively developed areas.
Yeah it might add up to a few thousand dollars. Maybe 10. Oh and a week or three of time. No need to send a sizable team of people. I'm being a little flippant but really - it's not an insurmountable expense. Contrast that with how much time and effort tracking down obscure sources across all of western pre-industrial history?
Longer answer: the Americas weren't peopled until perhaps 15-20kya (exact date is a matter of some contention). In the intervening time, there's a lot of inventions that happen (such as, say, the bow-and-arrow), which can have severe collateral effects, even for more distant populations. On top of that, there was a massive shift resulting from the European arrival in the New World, which starts by depopulating much of the continent, reducing the population by as much as 90%.
To give an example of how striking the difference can be: by giving guns to some Indians in New York, we turned other Indian farmers in Illinois into the archetypal Indians from westerns living in the Dakotas.
For a people to be living the same way for thousands of years requires them to pretty much be in complete isolation. Even the remaining uncontacted peoples are probably insufficiently isolated for that.
