[rhodorhoades]

The science of archeology is a destructive one. Temples and tombs escavated in the late 1800’s could have largely benefitted from the rigour and advances made in modern archeology. How much information and narrative are lost to time due to their archeological mistakes?

The same applies here. Experimenting with chemistry at all runs the risk of destroying the information forever. During these tests, the artifact must be preserved. If you destroy the artifact but are able to read it, did you really come out ahead?

[mattmaroon]

Yes, definitely you came out ahead in that case, but the problem is you’d likely have to destroy some amount of them without being able to read it before you got the method perfected.

[_a_a_a_]

I'll bite.

> If you destroy the artifact but are able to read it, did you really come out ahead?

Yes.