How good of an archaeologist was T.E. Lawrence prior to his rise to fame as a soldier?

Thanks to /u/Searocksandtrees for the shoutout. I can give a more detailed analysis of T.E. Lawrence's work on castles here. I am no expert on the man himself. Most of my information here is coming from Ronnie Ellenblum's Crusader Castles and Modern Histories. The relevant portions of the book are pages 64 - 68, although the whole book is worth a skim at the very least. I am also in the middle of Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, and Imperial Folly in the Making of the Modern Middle East. It is more of a popular history but he still compiles a fascinating story about Lawrence and the world in which he lived. I am also aware that Lawrence did some work in excavations prior to his service in the British military, but I do not know much about them so I will focus on his archaeological examination of castles.

The works of T.E. Lawrence are tied into a larger debate about the origins of concentric castles. This debate may seem trivial, but it has larger implications for how we view the impact of the crusades. Was it the people of the east teaching the crusaders or the other way around? Before Lawrence, scholars like Rey and Oman argued that concentric crusader castles were of Eastern origin. This is a perspective that Lawrence would later vehemently dispute.

However, before he traveled to the Levant, Lawrence cycled around Normandy and written on the castles there. He was also influenced by Ruskin's Stones of Venice and the grandeur of Gothic architecture. It was from these experiences that he developed grand ideas about Western architecture. Lawrence's book on crusader castles was actually written to satisfy his degree at Oxford, a task which served to partially replace his final exams because he had failed them earlier. In "The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture to the End of the Twelfth Century," he argues that crusader castles copied pre-existing Western architectural conventions. The crusaders knew how to build castles before they came to the Levant and simply applied these styles there. He calls certain Eastern castles "degenerate," particularly those that influenced the Templar castle at 'Athlit. Ellenblum provides an extract of Lawrence's theses that is particularly compelling (Ellenblum, 66):

"The Templars, working in 1218, threw aside all the carefully arranged schemes of flanking fire, all the covering works, all the lines of multiple defence which were being thought out meanwhile in Europe. At Athlit they relied on the one line of defence - an enormously thick wall, of colossal blocks of stone, with two scarcely projective rectangular towers upon it. These were the keeps, the master towers of the fortress, and instead of being cunningly arranged where they would be least accessible they are placed across the danger line, to bear the full brunt of the attack… The design is simply unintelligent, a reworking of the old ideas of Procopius, only half understood… Given unlimited time and labour, anyone can make a ditch so deep and a wall so high of stones so heavy as to be impregnable: but such a place is as much a prison for its defenders as a refuge: in fact a stupidity. Such is Athlit."

Ah, gotta love the British! Today, we know that Lawrence was tied up in his own notions of chivalry and medieval romanticism. Likewise, his book is ripe with nationalist and colonial discourse. His disparagement of Levantine accomplishments is particularly notable. He advocated "absolute supremacy of the West in all that pertained to the construction of fortresses and weaponry" (Ellenblum, 68). Today, we can see his work more as emblematic of colonial legacies than convincing scholarship. If you are interested in examples of more thorough scholarship that examines the Levantine side of the Crusades, the work of Ellenblum, Hillenbrand, Boas, Cobb, and Catlos are worth considering.