This is some wistful thinking for more Archaeology. Our current archaeology system consists of pots, but archaeology is so much more! This suggestion contains an update's worth of features for a theoretical Minecraft Ancient Archaeology update. So without further ado...

1. Fossilized Wastes

Fossilized Wastes are a special type of desert, as rare as a cherry grove, these deserts have large ribs, skulls, and tusks protruding from the sand, as well as the existing fossil structures buried underground. Surrounding these large bone structures are high quantities of suspicious sand, which have different drops I will get to later. In the Fossilized Wastes there are sandstorms, which cloud your vision and enable skeletons to spawn. These skeletons can not only spawn with bows, but also stone swords like their withering cousins. Zombies do not spawn at night here, only skeletons. In this primordial part of the world, civilizations have long fallen, and even the flesh has rotted off the bones of the undead.

2. Fossilly Drops

In the Fossilized Wastes, suspicious sand works a little differently. Instead of the usual pots, bones and coal are the common resources there. Special fossil fragments are found, which can be reassembled into a wide array of different ancient mob fossils, the sniffer is obviously one of them, but a neat easter egg to see would be a few rejected mob vote mobs, such as the great hunger or the barnacle. These fossils can be placed like armor stands to customize your base even more. There is yet one more type of bone to be found in the sands however: the canine and equine fragments. You are able to unearth a canine skull, canine ribs and a canine head to construct a skeleton wolf. By placing this creature's skeleton on some soul sand, you can bring it back to life! With some bonemeal, it'll be your best friend for life. This handy creature can only eat bonemeal, but it has an additional ability no other wolves have: sniffing for bones. In addition to functioning like a wolf, the skeleton wolf can detect suspicious sand, and will sit on it and sniff it. This lets you find sussy sand easier. The aforementioned equine fragments can be used to create a skeleton horse using the same methods.

3. Ceremonial Weapons

In many structures, such as the jungle temple or ocean monuments, you will find special items in the sand or gravel. These are ceremonial weapons. These weapons can be placed on armor stands and maybe some sort of new weapon stand. An example could be some sort of feather tomahawk. These weapons have decreased durability, as they are not intended for use in combat, but for decoration! The weapons could be customized, as an example, the tomahawk's feathers could be dyed, and its handle color could be changed with a smithing table and a select material, like armor trims. This adds some more self-expression that Mojang is focusing on. If you really want to use this weapon, you can enchant it with a new enchantment called functionality. This gives the weapon the stats of a diamond version of it. e.g. Feather tomahawk -> Diamond axe. The XP used to enchant ceremonial weapons and tools is lowered to 3/4ths, as they were used by ancient civilizations in their magical ceremonies.

4. Suspicious Snow

We have suspicious sand and now suspicious gravel, so why not suspicous snow? Suspicous snow spawns in mountains, maybe in the mouths of caves. I don't really know where else it would spawn. But basically, instead of just spitting out the item after it is unearthed, suspicious snow instead gives you the item, but encased in a block of ice! A block named encased ice if you will. This block will only give you the item if it is placed over an open fire. I've seen many people say that they liked the old unique method of baking pots over an open flame, so I think this would make for a good compensation. Additionally, you can use it as decoration, like a different style of item frame. If you place one type of item in a 1 block deep water block in a cold biome, the item will eventually be frozen over and become encased in encased ice, allowing you to frame any item in this unique way.

This isn't really a serious suggestion, as if Mojang really added all this stuff to the current update, it would be bloated, the features would be rushed, and the devs would be overworked. This is instead a what-if sceneario in which the devs decided not to make the Trails & Tails update, but instead created the archaeology update.

P.S. would have placed this suggestion under the update-sized flair if it was still around.