alt Hacker NewsNowadays they don’t in fact brush off artifacts immediately upon extraction, just clear them of large clumps of dirt. Precisely because the fragile remains of paint and whatever else might have been stuck to them can often teach us more than the artifact itself.
That one notch further on the spectrum that’s being described. Will “clear large chunks of dirt in the field” be found to have damaged information? Is there genuinely nothing to learn from the chunks of dirt? Or is it still too expensive to pay attention?