Kinda curious given the fact that classicists really a ton on secondary sources for major events and archaeology, and there job consists mostly asking new questions at old sources.Compared to a americanist who has a large volume of primary sources on particular people (enough to form things like the papers compilation books) and a good proportion of the buildings were there ''characters'' walked in survive.
What is your basis for this characterization of historians as "classicist" or "americanist"?
I couldn't do archive work; I have no experience with archives. Only a very few official documents survive from the Roman period with the exception of Egyptian papyri, most of which no one has touched for 100 years - not even cataloged - and I don't have the paleography skills to read them even if they are fairly complete and my greek were sharp enough.
I work out of libraries with published editions of texts, papyri, or inscriptions, published catalogs of coins, etc.
I hope by "secondary sources" you don't mean to include ancient historians like Livy or Appian. It would be a mistake to think I'm mostly reading modern scholars. My method (and this may not be the best) is to find something interesting in the ancient sources and then to do the library work to figure out what has been said about it and if there's something interesting to follow up on.