Wulfram wrote...
If you assume that Prothean researchers didn't have access to (the equivalent of) written records, then their total ignorance of Prothean culture is fairly forgivable. Our understanding of, say, Harappan culture is probably much worse.
But ME3 generally seems to imply that there's a hell of a lot of Prothean stuff lying around, which is problematic.
That can be explained by remembering that every time a prothean ruin is discovered, you have to deal with the beauracratic and self serving policies of the colony, the colonies home goverment, the council, the various corporations stationed on that colony, and the people who originally discovered it, all vying for the exclusive right to own all information or signifigance that comes about from the prothean artifact.
When you have that many players all ducking it constantly in the courts, it becomes easy to see how much many of these sites could become completely locked in legal backlogs and off limit zones. Not to mention the hanar and their entire religious motive for preserving prothean items or sites and forbidding tampering or study of them. Which I think was even mentioned in ME1.