Having access to the original artifact itself is still important. We have a lot of second hand accounts of things that happened in the distant past but for many

Having access to the original artifact itself is still important. We have a lot of second hand accounts of things that happened in the distant past but for many of these things, we are missing original accounts or original artifacts from the events in question. It would be nice to pick a wild example, to be able to see what the Ark of the Covenent actually looked like despite having a pretty good description of it, because we have no way of knowing (aside from faith I guess) how accurate the description is or what it leaves out and what that would tell us about the people who built it. Also, even the most complete description of an artifact is still bundled with the assumptions and presuppositions of those doing the describing. There may be things that future generations would wish to learn that we simply currently lack the grounding to explore. There's a parellel in the early expeditions to Pompeii or Troy which did a lot to destroy the sites in question and destroyed a lot of knowledge in the process.