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Modern views are that they were primitive and only had the most basic creations we can imagine
Um, whose modern views? Those don't sound like those current among archaeologists and other academics/scientists. Sounds more like the rather odd views you describe were your preconceptions that you've projected onto others having learned a bit better.
modern archeological convention
Really isn't the way you describe it.
Thing is, we know next to nothing about the people who built it, let alone their technology. Modern views are that they were primitive and only had the most basic creations we can imagine, the likes of which weren’t even invented by our species but by a preceding ape (homo habilis made tools 2 million years ago, neanderthalis made elaborate clothing and jewellery to decorate their dead in complex funeral rites tens if not hundreds of thousands of years ago).
We believe homo sapiens sapiens has been physiologically pretty much the same for a couple hundred thousand years now. Was it really only a few thousand years ago that humans got creative and industrious enough to create wooden machines to lift things?
Not directed at you personally, but modern archeological convention strikes me as having a Victorian attitude to science, equating a (perceived) lack of cultural sophistication with an actual lack of cultural sophistication.