The broader lesson is that archaeological collections are not static repositories of already-analyzed material.

They are dynamic scientific resources whose value changes as analytical methods improve.

Material that was uninformative with 1980s methods can become highly informative with 2020s methods.

The investment in maintaining comprehensive collections is an investment in the future capacity of the field to extract knowledge from the physical evidence that survives from the past.

The Evidence That Will Not Come: Sites Under Water

One of the most important constraints on the archaeological record of early American settlement is the simple geographic fact that much of the most relevant landscape is now underwater.