To describe the problem of archaeology of a religious group, imagine this scenario. Some cataclysm buries any one of our cities. All of our books rot away, and maybe no one can read our language for years. We would cook with very similar metal pots. The problem with archaeology is that we have some problems with identification from time to time.
Biblical archaeology has some of the very same problems.
Even though we know where Jerusalem has been for a while, there is no pottery tradition that marks Israel from its neighbors. The ate off the same ware. They built their buildings in the same way. Things become even more difficult when attempting to identify a religion archaeologically. The process is necessarily a reconstruction, frequently depends heavily on tracing back known symbols.