I found it interesting to contemplate how much harder it would be for someone to do this level of analysis and draw conclusions from it if they weren't physically proximate.

I love remote work, and I hope to sustain it for the rest of my career, but there is something to be said for direct exposure to the systems you study.

(It also makes me appreciate all the more how hard it must be for archaeologists et al to glean details of the past from fragmentary evidence of a world long gone.)