Yes, I would agree that there is a subtle bias towards seeing stone/brick/cement construction being more impressive, spectacular, and worthy of regard. Often, monuments like the Pyramids, the Parthenon, the Great Wall of China, are regarded as "wonders of the ancient world".
On the other hand, construction in more perishable materials is not often given much attention or regarded as an achievement. Outside of specialists, not many people know or care about the many hundreds of miles of earthen ramparts constructed around Benin city from AD 1000-1500. People may have heard of Cahokia, and know its population size, but probably won't have a clear mental picture of what it looked like, whereas they might have a clearer idea of the layout of Ankor Wat.
On this sub, there are occasionally questions about why Africans or native North Americans didn't build structures in stone, when everyone else was. These questions carry an implicit assumption that construction in stone is an achievement (and would be regarded so by all people around the world), and societies would not simply choose to build in materials that were more available or easier to work with.
Granted, this preference for stone ruins is partly because construction in less durable materials is often less archaeologically apparent. Settlements can be found by uncovering post holes and fire pits and earthen embankments, but those are comparatively harder to find.
If we look at the example of the Swahili city-states, archaeologists have been discussing the stone towns of the social elite for about a hundred years at this point. However, its only within the last 30 years that archaeologists have started to look for the wood, mud and grass huts that were the dwellings of the majority of the population.
Turning to the other side of your question, viz written records. Again, I would say yes.
In addition to reliance on Oral traditions, we can also turn to linguistics to learn certain things. The vocabulary used for farming in certain languages in Kenya and Tanzania point to earlier South Cushitic settlement in that area, later displaced by Nilotic and Bantu populations that adopted Cushitic loanwords.^1 Specialized words for parts of a spear point to innovations, words denoting a "good hunter" or an "average hunter" imply the importance of hunting in proto-Botatwe societies.^2
We can also look to specialist disciplines like Archaeobotany to find plant or pollen remains, and so construct a picture of what crops were being cultivated. We can look at bones to tell us what animals were hunted or were domesticated and herded.
Or we can look to genetics to perhaps give us more insight on population movements. Maybe, if we are lucky, it can tell us if 13th century nobles from Kilwa had genetic markers from Iran, meaning the Kilwa chronicle is plausible.
All of this is to say, there are lots of ways of getting discrete bits of historical information about the past. The downside is, outside of Oral traditions, these methods are impersonal and not great for constructing narrative.
Also, the History profession as it has traditionally been conceptualized is very much rooted in textual analysis. Methods like Oral history, Linguistics, and Archaeobotany and Archaeology have tended to come under the umbrella of Anthropology in Academia. There certainly are individuals and programs that seek an interdisciplinary approach that combines History and Anthropology approaches, but barriers do still exist.
One thing I have noticed about the questions in this sub is that there is a rather noticeable gap in the sorts of questions asked by region. Questions about European or American history are frequently about individual personalities. People will ask about Julius Caesar's last words or ask was Elizabeth Bathory framed?, or questions about "what would my day be like as an X in year Y".
On the other hand, questions about Africa tend to focus on depersonalized queries about kingdoms or the continent. There is almost never a question about a specific individual, unless it is Mansa Musa.
I think unquestionably, that gap is reflective of a difference in familiarity. Folks have enough of a foundation in European or American history to ask about an individual and presume they will be understood. Folks in the US and Europe don't tend to have that much knowledge about African history, and so simply cannot ask questions about individuals they have never read or heard about. I think that lack of familiarity stems from educational curriculae that largely consider European history "relevant" and African history outside of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism as "not relevant".
1 African Archaeology by David Phillipson pp 211.
2 "Hunting Reputations: Talent, Individuals and Community in Precolonila South Central Africa" by Kathryn M. DeLuna in The Journal of African History 53 (2012) pp. 279-299
Edit- removed sentence referencing a post that has been deleted, provided in-line citation for 2nd source.
Could you clarify what rough time period you mean when you say "pre-modern history"?
Absolutely. By far the biggest problem in history is the "streetlight effect". We're biased toward what is easiest to observe. This is actually a multiplicative effect because it increases focus on the most obvious historical records. The most obvious records result in the establishment of a historical narrative, and in the creation of departments and fields of study. The results of study in those areas is often what inspires others to become historians and biases them towards studying the same things. Most budding historians do not choose their areas of study by tossing a die and picking at random, instead they usually choose based on what they are interested in, and that is usually heavily biased toward what has been extensively studied already.
Additionally, the situation is much worse than what you describe, because there are more sources of difficulty involved in uncovering the history of human civilizations. A major one is geopolitical. There is a tremendous amount of historical data that came about from excavations and research in specific regions during specific windows of time when doing that research locally was possible. Access to sites isn't a given for all locations and all times. So there is often a very wide range between the amount of research that has been done in one area where ancient civilizations lived versus another. This is a particular problem for ancient civilizations around the Eastern Mediterranean due to the occasional difficulty of access to many sites. And this isn't always due merely to local political instability, for decades much of Anatolia has been under-researched due to government restrictions on excavations.
But wait, there's more. Excavations take time and resources. The quality of excavations varies based on the state of the art at the time the excavation was done as well as the resources brought to bear and the diligence applied. For this reason, most excavations are not up to the highest current standards of what is possible today. Many excavations happened in periods where standards and techniques were not as good. And even today many excavations aren't as thorough or make use of the best techniques as they could. This means only a tiny fraction of all excavations represent the application of the best techniques, with a pyramid underneath of excavations of inferior quality. (Not to mention incidents of outright destruction of historical artifacts and evidence.) This means that even factoring in the difficulty of archaeological evidence being preserved (the right materials being used, the right climate and conditions, no destruction, etc.) there's a lot of missing information from that evidence just due to varying practices.
Add on to that the fact that a lot of the pioneers in the field of history and archaeology have been extremely biased in one way or another, willing to skew facts to support their favored theories. There's only been a fairly narrow window of time with which to correct those biases, and that work has not in any way been even remotely fully completed, that is work that will take generations on top of all of the other work that needs doing.
All in all you begin to realize that when you're looking at history you're doing so through a lens that has a series of filters applied, each of which makes the view spottier, muddier, and adds some skew and coloration to the image in some way. The result being a muddy, patchy, incomplete picture.
And, while any historian would agree with what I've said above in terms of the incompleteness of our view of history, few take the effort to take the lesson to heart fully and make it clear how incredibly incomplete our view of history actually is.
Unfortunately, the typical historical narrative (and so often even today history is communicated through narratives, even from the most sophisticated professional historians) tends to skip over gaps of knowledge too easily and tends to hand wave away issues related to ignorance about important civilizations in history. Consider, for example, the Scythians and other nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppes. These are civilizations that were incredibly important to the course of ancient history in Eurasia, as important and influential as the Greeks or the Egyptians. But they aren't talked about as much, because there isn't much to say. They didn't keep records, and were seemingly not literate, they didn't build cities, they didn't leave behind a lot, and it makes it very, very difficult to piece together their history. More so, due to the lack of records there isn't a list of kings and battles that can be used as an easy substitute for real history. Big men doing important things on specific dates is a lazy way to write "history" and even today it's one of the more common ways to do it. That option just isn't available for some civilizations, and that makes it even more difficult to tell their story well.
Overall, we need to understand that our view of history and especially of ancient history is not a substantially complete view with only a few inconvenient gaps here and there. Rather we need to understand that we are looking through a soda straw at tiny portions of history, and even then not seeing 100% clearly. Our ignorance outweighs our knowledge by orders of magnitude. And the factors you've pointed out are major contributing factors toward that situation.