One other thing that was required: the patience not to ruin it. So much has been lost to well-meaning archaeologists who dug up and threw away things that they

One other thing that was required: the patience not to ruin it. So much has been lost to well-meaning archaeologists who dug up and threw away things that they didn't think were important. They tried cleaning and preservation techniques on artifacts without testing, sometimes ruining them in the process. They ripped things out of context, and "restored" them based on guesses that were sometimes flagrantly wrong. Of course they couldn't be expected to know everything that would come in the future, so blame can sometimes perhaps be muted. But it's especially positive that they extricated these particular objects very carefully and just waited for a way to extract information that they could hardly have hoped for.