I read about a remarkable archeology incident that happened just a few days ago.
The idea appears lunatic to start with. Using a moon drill for archeology. Yes, a moon drill, that excavates a chunk of moon about a hundred kilometers across and drags it into orbit where it can be exploded into a moon ore belt.
As tools for planetside (or moonside) archeology, I am more used to the artifact chip brush for carefully removing dust from precious findings. If really necessary, a small hand shovel or an excavation knife can be used. If you are a real brute, you can add a rock hammer and a chisel to your toolkit. But a moon drill?
Reading more into the details, the idea becomes a bit less crazy (just a tiny bit). As the head of the project, ms. Lauralite Anne Brezia explains, the moon drill actually does not hit the center of the region that it excavates, it digs around it. It is a bit like moving a precious plant to a new spot in the garden, you use the shovel and keep a clod of earth around its roots intact. Yet as every gardener knows, the plant does suffer. At the center of the region that is extracted by the moon drill, there will be extremely strong seismic activity. So, you will need a lot of inertial stabilizers to keep any structure from collapsing.
Also, buildings are constructed with gravity in mind, and often it is the weight of stone on stone which provides the structural stability of the construction. Bringing it off the moon into weightlessness requires special consolidation techniques. All this effort makes me think it is easier to disassemble the ruins stone by stone and reassemble them elsewhere.
Now for this ruin, disassembly may not have been possible. It is an underground structure, several kilometers wide and half a kilometer below the surface of Umai, the first moon of Eugales V. Indeed this is not something you can transport without a huge clod of earth around it. I do not know why it cannot be investigated in situ, though.
There is also some mystery surrounding the particular relics that were in the ruins - they may be advanced AI's. This brings its own problems: it is a bit like thawing a virus from a chunck of ancient ice and hoping it isn't a lethal pathogen. It also of course brings its own opportunities - the AI could hold immensely valuable historical data.
Unfortunately, we will probably not know. The moon drill technique went wrong: the tractor beam failed and dropped the chunk back onto the moon. The crash was more than any intertial stabilizer can handle...
