I have to agree. Stonehenge is a special place. I proposed to my wife inside Stonehenge (at dawn on a Spring day, years ago) and now it is a very special plac

I have to agree. Stonehenge is a special place. I proposed to my wife inside Stonehenge (at dawn on a Spring day, years ago) and now it is a very special place to me in particular. I know that no matter how successful any invention or startup I create is, that I will never make any person happier than I made her on that day. Non-destructive testing/measurement methods have so many plusses that you'd wonder why they aren't mandatory in archeology. In addition to the obvious fact that a damaged site or article can't then be tested with better future technologies, non-destructive methods are more reliable (calibrations and measurements can be repeated). This is so much more of an issue in archeology than it is in say, laboratory biology, where if a sample is destroyed there is often the possibility of resampling. It is more analogous to crime scene investigation, where if you destroy the sample DNA with a bad PCR, you may destroy the entire possibility of using that evidence. Really, the only justification for not mandating non-destructive methods in archeology is that we can always imagine that there is a better future method than whatever we have now, so if we always wait for an uncertain future, no archeology will actually get done. I think that this conflict means that there is a real opportunity for collaboration between archeological societies and funders and scientists/device manufacturers of non-destructive methods. By default, archeologists tend to use lots of grad students with shovels, because they are cheap and being a grad student with a shovel is a rite of passage in archeology. If non-destructive device manufacturers would help replace the student shovels with e.g. student Raman scattering devices, this might help spur more use of the non-destructive methods to the point where archeologists would look askance at anyone who used shovels without first using less destructive tools. Just some thoughts; I'm not an archeologist. I have seen a similar change in tool use prompted by device manufacturers working with professional societies, though, in radiation therapy (is anyone in the developed world using Co-60 with conformal blocks anymore?).