Maybe the artifacts should stay in the ground for no one to see? Or buried in museum basements where no one but researchers can enjoy the material culture of long-dead peoples?

Important private collections are almost always published and these collectors spearhead (and pay for) most of the research into the artifacts. Without private collectors the public would remain wholly ignorant of whatever it was being collected.

The vast, vast majority of museum holdings are never displayed to the public so instead of being kept in permanent obscurity these artifacts would better serve the public being private collections.

I've posted on the used book business before. We specialize in a subject that has, maybe, 5000 relevant titles and we have multiple copies of many of the same title. The vast majority are out of print and of those most of the authors and publishing houses are dead or defunct. Their heirs might possibly hold the copyright but I haven't gone that deep into the research for most of them. When my current project is finished I am going to scan copies of the oldest titles I have in the worst condition(so I can break them). The earliest are about 1890-1920. I am going to give them away for free via a pdf link. I see this as a way to market my intact, very good condition copies to collectors who are sitting on the fence about spending a lot of money on a first edition as well as giving my niche's community access to the text (while vising my website) which is scholastically dubious but historically important. Assuming the books are out of copyright I feel this is totally ethical. There are a plethora of OOP Print-on-Demand titles available for sale at used book sites like Amazon Marketplace, ABEbooks.com and Alibris.com Maybe I should charge $.99 a copy like iTunes does for Beethoven or Scott Joplin.