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colechristensen parent
Once properly documented, I have some skepticism that it's really necessary to hold every historical artifact found, inside some museum archive basically never to be seen again.
AlotOfReading
It isn't, but it's impossible to know what will be useful for research again in the future, so historical researchers make an effort to preserve what they can and avoid excavating if possible.
southernplaces7
What else should be done with the artifacts? And also why not? It's like storing your data. If you can keep it relatively inexpensive, why not keep it around just in case some future need or curiosity makes it worthwhile?
colechristensen OP
If I find something without particular significance that's not a part of an archaeological site, say a Roman coin in a field somewhere, it's fine if there's a requirement that a museum gets to take records and do any sort of scans it wants. But unless it was some item of particular cultural heritage or research interest, the museum should give it back to me or buy it from me or give me something in return like a fair tax break.

Lots and lots of stuff gets cataloged and archived and basically never looked at again resulting in little archeological value or any other public value and is kind of just scientific hoarding.

neaden
I mean roman coins for example are so plentiful that they are sold relatively cheaply, we have more then enough of them for all the museums of the world if they wanted them. I don't think viking era treasure is anywhere close to as common but there comes a point where it's plentiful enough.
BurningFrog
You can probably do a detailed 3d scan and retain 95% of the scientific value.
heikkilevanto
No, at some point they want to analyze the impurities in the gold, or the isotopes, or something else we don't know yet...
BurningFrog
Sure, that can be done together with the scanning.
fc417fc802
It can't, because we don't know what yet unknown questions we might want to ask in the future or what yet uninvented technology might come to exist. Add a limited budget and storage space and it becomes clear why the preference is often not to excavate but instead to restrict public access to the site and leave things in the ground.
BurningFrog
We can measure impurities and isotopes extremely well, which is what the post I responded to mentioned. This is very mature technology.

You're right that we don't know what new branches of science might be developed that could produce new insights from old artifacts.

But remember the situation. My idea makes it possible to record and analyze ancient finds that currently just disappear. It only gets us 99% of what we want, but in the current system we get 0%.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Nirvana...

fc417fc802
The isotopes were just an arbitrary example. The important bit was at the end "or something else we don't know yet". Granted I'd guess that's fairly unlikely for coins specifically.

> currently just disappear

They don't though. The preferences are as other comments have described - to stash the artifacts away in storage or to leave them in the ground for excavation in the future.

Whether or not the laws and common practices are fair to the people who discover the items is a separate matter.

rectang
Thank goodness you weren't in charge of the Herculanum scrolls.
pbhjpbhj
We can produce 3D scans of the gold, do mass spectroscopy.

Do you feel that vikings somehow embedded secrets in their coin?

Scrolls have writing on, if we can't yet read them we'd know that there was something else to discover (known unknowns) and clearly wouldn't dispose of them.

Of course the Vikings might have embedded secret extraterrestrial technologies in their coins, but I'd take the bet that they haven't.

The downthread comment about leaving things in the ground is right though -- it was, and is imo, the right thing to do.

delusional
I'm pretty sure more than 5% of the scientific value is in the actual physical material. You can't examine the physics of the thing from a 3d scan.

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