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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

> Over the past few decades, scientists have struggled to explore this intriguing aspect of the settlement of Britain because they have faced a critical problem that affects many major prehistoric sites in the UK. In many cases, these have been stripped of all their sediment, rocks and other materials and so cannot be studied using the armoury of modern technologies that scientists have developed in the 20th century.

One hopes we will leave a few sites undisturbed so that 22nd+ century archaeologists can have a go with their fancy technologies.

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Apparently leaving a reasonable portion of every site undisturbed is standard practice now. At Göbekli Tepe they have only uncovered ~5% of the site and are moving very slowly nowadays.

I always think the same thing at these things. But it must occur to the archaeologists too, and maybe they know they're recording everything meticulously and storing samples such that it's still as available as it could be to future tech, vs. discarded surrounding soil/sediment for example that 'could still be used today if only we knew where'? I don't know.

So often I watch/read various excavations with resulting museum/institutional acquisitions and I think to myself, “things may have been undiscovered, but now that they’re discovered these artifacts are on borrowed time, long-long term.”

The artifacts weren't in a stasis field when they were buried in the ground: they were decaying there too. Whether that was faster or slower than after being excavated and stored in a museum depends on the artifact's composition and the properties of the place it was stored. I guess in a museum, however, they're somewhat more susceptible to damage or theft since now people know about them, or they could be damaged or destroyed in a war.

I get the same feeling; every time a museum or archive expands its collection, it's taking on a long-term responsibility for those objects.

Put your discovered objects in a warehouse, now their survival is conditional on the continued funding of whatever institution owns the building. If the items are in fancy climate-controlled storage units, who will maintain the air conditioning and pay the electricity bill for the next ten, fifty, or a hundred years?

I'm sure people who work at archives have to think about these questions on time-scales much longer than those offered by grants or rounds of charity fundraising.

One doesn’t want to be the next Schliemann.

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