Historical sciences as cosmology, historical geology and paleontology study past entities, events and processes of their respectives objects of study (the universe, the planet earth, organisms). All this objects of study suffer historical process that destroy information to present scientific observers, difficulting the contrastability of hypotheses, despite this, historical sciences had been relatively successful in creating knowledge of their domain of facts. This confidence in the plausibility of studying the past has yet not arrived in archaeology, where some forms of extreme skepticism about the posibility of obtaining knowledge on past social systems still prevail.
It is harder to study something, of which we are part of objectively. Subjective knowledge is therefore a function of collective acceptance at a point in time and place and varies more frequently in the social/human domain than in the domain of the inanimate objects. Hence stability of epistemology is an illusion-mistaken for reliability-again a function of our subjectivity.
The physical sciences study ontology, and we can have as much ontological knowledge of past human societies. Epistemology that deals with how those societies understood their ontic condition depends on what evidence we have of how they communicated and acted, which is much more ambiguous. But both ontology and epistemology have their puzzles - we can neither be certain what wiped out the dinosaurs nor whether extra-terrestrial visitors helped build the pyramids.
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