It seems that most modern historians think that the Mycenaean Bronze Age culture was founded by the Achaeans. I’ve read other historians like William Ridgeway and think this couldn’t be possible, because the Homeric poems for example talk about how Mycenae was a newly acquired holding. Or other ancient historians talk about how the heroic Perseus founded Mycenae and it eventually passed to Pelops. Furthermore, there is reference to an autochthonous race of people inhabiting the Peloponnesus and Argolis regions before the arrival of the Achaeans. Those historians say that the Achaeans surely held Mycenae and Tiryns for some time; eventually being conquered by the Dorians, but could not have founded and built the cities. They hold that this indigenous stock of people were the Pelasgians.
They say another form of proof is that Mycenae had the beehive tombs built, but the Homeric Achaeans burnt their bodies. This doesn’t seem sound to me though, because Aeschylus and Euripides both clearly talk about Agamemnon’s body being laid to rest in a tomb which sacrificial altars, which were found in Mycenae. Is it possible that cremation was only used in times of war away from home? Or more likely that the Achaeans adopted the customs of the race that built the Mycenaean cities?
I know this is a rambling and unstructured post but I’d love some insight here about the Pelasgians, the Achaeans, and their relation to Mycenaean culture.
Unfortunately, you seem to be relying on wildly out-of-date scholarship. William Ridgeway, the only scholar whom you mention by name, died in 1926, which was nearly a hundred years ago at this point. Scholars today know vastly more about the Mycenaean civilization than anyone in Ridgeway's time could have possibly known, thanks to the many important archaeological discoveries that have been made in the past century, the decipherment of the Mycenaean Linear B script in the early 1950s, and the translation of Hittite documents that are contemporary with the Mycenaean civilization and shed light on it.
Quite simply, any source about the Mycenaeans written before the decipherment of Linear B is going to be worse than useless if you're looking for factually accurate information, since scholars before the decipherment were not aware that the Mycenaean language was a form of Greek and could not read any of the documents of that era that scholars have access to now.
Early-twentieth-century scholarship on the Mycenaeans was also frequently colored by racism. For instance, if you're wondering why early-twentieth-century scholars found the idea that the Pelasgians founded the Mycenaean civilization "so controversial," it's because many scholars at the time believed that the "Achaians" were members of the supreme "Nordic race" and that the Pelasgians were members of the inferior "Mediterranean race."
Leaving that aside, let's clear up some terminology. The name Achaians does not refer to an ethnic group distinct from the Mycenaean civilization, but rather to the people of the Mycenaean civilization itself, or at the very least a subset of the Mycenaeans. This is most clearly demonstrated by the fact that surviving Hittite documents that are contemporary with the Mycenaean civilization refer to the Mycenaeans as Aḫḫiyawā, which is now generally agreed to be a Hittite rendering of Ἀχαιϝοί (Achaiwoí), the older form of the name Ἀχαιοί (Achaioí) or Achaians that is used in the Homeric epics and later Greek literature.
The name Πελασγοί (Pelasgoí) or Pelasgians is one that Greek authors in the later periods that are historically better attested, starting with the Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 490 BCE), used to refer to groups that they believed had inhabited Greece from the earliest times.
Even in texts from the better-historically-attested periods, the term can have different meanings in various contexts. In some places, it refers to mythical peoples of the distant past, but, in other places, it refers to various groups that existed in Greece in historic times. For instance, the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) says in his Histories 1.56–57 that the Athenians are Pelasgoi who became Hellenes (i.e., Greeks) by adopting the Greek language and culture. In other places, the term refers to peoples living in Greece in historic times who apparently spoke a language other than Greek and were seen as culturally distinct. In any case, the word is not attested in the Bronze Age and it is probably a mistake to apply it to any people during the Bronze Age.
Your arguments above rely heavily on the assumption that sources from the later, better-historically-attested periods of Greek history display accurate knowledge of the culture and situation during the Bronze Age, but this is an incorrect assumption. Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greek authors display spotty knowledge of the Bronze Age at best. They may occasionally get things right, but they are wrong more often than not and generally cannot be relied upon for information about the Bronze Age.
It has been generally agreed for the past thirty or forty years at least that the mythical Dorian invasion, which you mention here as though it were a historical event, never really happened. See, for instance, the historian of ancient Greece Jonathan M. Hall's conclusion in his book A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200–479 BCE (first published in 2007 by Blackwell Publishing and in a revised edition in 2013) on page 51 of the revised edition:
“There can be little doubt that the collapse of the political and economic system centered on the Mycenaean palaces provoked a climate of instability and insecurity and that some people – whether for reasons of safety or economic necessity – decided to abandon their former homes and seek a living elsewhere. But it is also clear that the developed literary narrative for the Dorian migration is the end product of a cumulative synthesis of originally independent traditions. As such, it need not reflect a dim and hazy memory of a genuine single movement of a population from north to south, even if it captures the general instability and mobility of this period. Rather, it seeks to establish a common identity for a plethora of communities whose pedigrees were undoubtedly far from uniform in origin.”
Unfortunately, in modern times, the myth of the Dorian invasion has been most widely deployed in support of white supremacist and Nazi ideologies. For further reference, the classicist Rebecca Futo Kennedy wrote a blog post in January 2018 about how white supremacists use the myth of the Dorian invasion to claim spurious racial connections to the ancient Greeks, I wrote a blog post myself about the myth of the Dorian invasion and its history back in January 2021, and the classicist Peter Gainsford (known as u/KiwiHellenist here on Reddit) wrote a blog post in March 2022 about the role that the myth of the Dorian invasion played in early twentieth-century white supremacist and Nazi ideologies.
The notion that there was a single ethnic group that single-handedly "founded" the Mycenaean civilization is a naïve misconception of early twentieth-century scholarship; the reality was certainly far more complicated. Admittedly, the evidence for the origin and ethnic makeup of the Mycenaean civilization is extremely limited, but the initial settlement of Proto-Greek speakers in Greece most likely took place centuries before the Mycenaean civilization as we know it arose. In the intervening time between the arrival of Proto-Greek speakers and the emergence of the Mycenaean civilization, there was most likely much cultural blending and fusion between Proto-Greek speakers and the various Pre-Greek peoples who had already been living in Greece before.
This blending of cultures is fairly evident in the Mycenaean civilization itself. The scribes who worked at the Mycenaean palatial centers all wrote in the Mycenaean dialect of the Greek language, the basic structure and vocabulary of which they inherited from the Proto-Greeks, and many of the names that occur in the tablets are clearly Greek. On the other hand, though, the Minoan civilization of Krete, which is usually thought to have been non-Greek-speaking, had an outsized influence on Mycenaean material culture and even the Linear B script that Mycenaean scribes wrote in is generally agreed to have been based on the Minoan Linear A script.