There's a group among what used to be called "living history" folks (reenactors and docents, mostly) who now advocate "experimental archeology" (I didn't make up the term, folks.. I think Ivor Noel Hume is responsible for this one).

The original idea is that if you do what they did then, with the tools and materials that they had then, you can learn things from the process that you cannot learn from the documentary evidence.

I'm NOT saying that the idea doesn't have merit- it does. But there are a great many ways for it to go astray, and one of the more obvious (one would think) is to ignore the documentary evidence that does exist because it seems to contradict personal experience gained in this way.

The problem is that "personal experience" of history can never be more than a very rough approximation- we cannot become historical people in historical settings, with different pasts, experiences and skills, and we cannot leave the 21st century people that we really are behind, with all of our prejudices, foreknowledge, and cultural biases. No matter how much we try to "recreate" past events, the past cannot be resurrected, and our efforts will always fall short.

The documentary evidence, on the other hand, is the real people of the past speaking directly to us FROM the past.

So... all of this would seem pretty obvious, but it's a free country, and there just had to be groups who reversed the priorities, who contend that when their "recreated" personal experience contradicts documentary evidence, that evidence is wrong.

There are indeed such groups, mostly small and largely ignored, but even a small group of verbal bullies and their sycophants can easily dominate an on-line forum.

That's what happened. These particular dear folks were fond of just stating what the "truth" of history was without any contributory evidence at all ("woodsmen would have all worn brown"), and when someone pointed out contradictory evidence from primary sources, that person was loudly criticized for daring to contradict those who "walked the walk", i.e. KNEW that woodsman wore brown, because THEY wore brown, and it worked for them. Post hoc ergo ante hoc.