Thanks, @creatr - I appreciate your substantive response. I kind of figured you'd want to back-engineer that alien hardware, lol, but the archeologists had another perspective - They were in awe of the fact that these noble beings were like us - humanoid and persons - not robotic droids sent on a mission, and they wanted to preserve their dignity out of respect for life ( this is an aspect of archeology I find unsettling about treatment of human remains regardless of age - I've covered this topic in other stories because I'm fascinated with archeology and have witnessed what I find to be unnecessarily intrusive probing of ancient burial sites and moving and displaying human remains.) It's sad and very unsettling, IMO