This practice of defining a reconstruction so pedantically as to be wholly unlike real life is just so dumb to me, as a layperson. This would be like “recreating” the experience of using a Commodore 64 but we can’t find any intact copies of the software at all so we provide a fake “OS” that requires the user to write code in ASM only, and say “Ladies and gentlemen, behold our reconstruction! This is what it was like!”
The archeologists are already adding fake detail, just at a different level of abstraction. Did they constrain themselves to only painting in the places where they find remnants of pigment? No, otherwise there would be gaps, cracks, and random interruptions of other colors in the painted figures. And there's the guesswork involved in going from spectral analysis (+ other tools) of a pigment sample to an actual paint that could have been plausibly available to the artist.
Reconstruction, (similar to translation) is an art that combines carefuly study of evidence and craftfully filling in gaps and adding in detail where necessary (or leaving details unfilled and ambiguous to communicate the impossibility of total translation or reconstruction!) to present some communicable form of the original that gives the viewer some closer but imperfect access to it.
