I find it hard to believe they’d tell an archeologist ‘no’ for some reason.
Depends on if enough of the team is superstitious, and fears their findings will lead to a greater disturbance unleashing a long forgotten ancient force that may devastate the region.
Buuut that’s highly unlikely, so yeah, weird they didn’t reach out. Unless they were the superstitious ones in a different way and wanted to be first to seize an ancient power (or less interestingly, they wanted the credit for the finding and didn’t want to let on what they were looking for).
Machinery’s certainly a result of technological innovation, but not the only result. Different materials, even altogether different forms of organisms are also results of technological innovation. OP’s left it rather open, so it may be that they also mean these different applications of science.