I just wrote a piece on archeology in the Netherlands in the beginning of the 20th century. So let me share my bit on that.

In the Netherlands, aswell as in many other countries, archeology is closely tied to the rise of nationalism. In the Netherlands nationalism peaked at the end of the 19th century, but no real archeology had been conducted, though there had been a categorical collection of archeological finds by the conservator of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (National Museum of antiquities), Willem Pleyte.

The first archeologist that did field work was Jan Hendrik Holwerda. He did excavations on known sites of Roman settlement in the Netherlands between 1907 and 1917. His method wasn't overly precise, as he only dug exploratory trenches (up to three per site). He used his finds to support the Batavian origin of the Dutch people, a theory that had been around since the 15th century when humanist historians had used Tacitus' mention of the Batavian revolt against the Romans to historically validate the revolt of the Netherlands agains Spain.

Holwerda quite critiquelessly looked for any evidence to support his theory. For example he found the remaind of an old Roman armycamp in Nijmegen that had shown signs of burn damage in the first century bc. and he quickly concluded that it had to be the army camp of the leader of the Batavian revolt, Julius Civilis, as Tacitus had written that his camp had burned down by the Romans as punishment. Holwerda rejected all signs that it could have been a Roman camp. He said itcould not have been a Roman settlement as there was loads of Batavian pottery and the walls were at different angles from a typical Roman camp.

Holwerda's method came under scrutiny by his succesors, who concluded that his method was flawed (further excavations showed that the camp at Nijmegen had clearly been a Roman settlement etc.). Holwerda was academically discredited by the 1940's and never got funding for his grand book on the Batavians.

So, at least for Dutch archeology we see that the scientific field of archeology moved quite quicky from a 'finding evidence for what we know from literature' to a more modern critique of evidence. Holwerda's findings were still influential in general history books till 1945, but that was partly because the Batavian germanic origin resonated well with the German occupier. In the 50's there would be more room for critique but it would take till the '70s for historian Ivo Schöffer to coin the term 'Batavian myth' for the Dutch theory of origin based on the Batavians and put a stop to national self-determination using the past.

Sources: L. Swinkels, De Bataven: verhalen van een verdwenen volk ; N.C.F. van Sas, 'De mythe Nederland', De negentiende eeuw ; Holwerda, J.H., Nederland’s vroegste geschiedenis.

You may be interested in Bruce Trigger's A History of Archaeological Thought which covers early antiquity acquisition to relatively recent theoretical approaches today.