[thesagan]

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.”

[shiroiushi]

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.

[extua]

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.