"We chose this area because we believed it should be archeologically interesting based on XYZ. However, we searched through ABC methods and found nothing there"

"We chose this area because we believed it should be archeologically interesting based on XYZ. However, we searched through ABC methods and found nothing there" would be valuable for the future. Maybe XYZ isn't as good as we though, maybe ABC couldn't find it. Maybe now some other sod in the future won't try that location. Not as valuable as a discovery, but very far off zero value. Yet the reward in academia would be near-zero.