And mind you, not neccessarily government sponsorship, but over-culture/academic interest of some type is often the only thing (other than certain layers in the soil
) that ends up preserving any knowledge about a thing. However, a surprising amount of knowledge often lives at a folkloric level that is often unfortuneately dismissed by over culture experts as "legend" urban or otherwise, as not presented in the proper way by the proper person to suit the rules of that tribe, or as "not real blues (bowie knife, Japanese sword, insert category) because it doesn't fit our definition." Also, it does seem to me there is an insidiousness in the way it does its preserving; by replacing deep and broad genuine and ancient traditions with its often shallow and outside understanding gleaned from studying a subject with a (relatively) few socially designated experts for perhaps a matter of a few decades, or at very most the two or three centuries in which the overculture has been at the point of advancement (in its own terms; wealth and magic, mostly) to have begun to take more of an interest in other cultures than what can be gotten from them in direct material or economic terms and how.