The benefit of a laser is that it can not only remove material, it can also discolor it. Either as a side effect of removing it or simply as a lower-power setting. And discolorations can be picked up with optical methods, which are far more accessible, reliable and higher density than 3d scanning.
Another variation of this is how we encode information into granite and other stones in Western funeral rites (grave stones): you engrave the information, then fill the groove with pigment. The pigment is susceptible to weathering, but the 3d information is pretty resistant. When the pigment is too worn down you just smear some more on there and wipe the excess away, leaving pigment only in the grooves, making the message clearly visible again
I’ve been plenty of graveyards where the old gravestones are completely unreadable. Did they use different/worse stone in the past or is this the most likely outcome of new gravestones after a couple hundred years? Several people have mentioned engraving into stone in this discussion but in this one example I can think of engraved stone, it doesn’t leave me feeling confident about the medium. What am I missing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary%27s_Church,_Whitby
There are many headstones here that are completely destroyed by salty sea spray. Erosion of rock is something that is often told as a million-year process but it is very visible within your lifetime depending on the conditions