>These kinds of modern excavations reveal a lot more about ordinary daily life than the older translation of temple documents and royal inscriptions do, however.

I don't think these are separate things. Excavating is a blind effort, there is no 'modern excavation', we just find more interesting things now because we excavate a hell lot more then we used to decades ago. And these boring translations of temple documents and royal inscriptions is how we get context for the objects and layers we find.