Ah, consider him surprised then! After all, from his experience archaeologists are always in a hurry to go naming things, usually wrong (and worst, boring) names, and he admitted he thought Daniel would be in a hurry to do just that. Daniel's explanation was startling, but he thought he rather liked it. Power in a name. True sometimes. Probably not here, but sometimes true. And maybe Daniel was being humanly sentimental, too, because in other cases, a corpse was just a corpse. "Recycling", he'd told Rose Tyler once, lifetimes ago.

"I'm not sure this alien would agree. But it's not like s/he's in a state to argue, so!" The Doctor clapped his hands together, glancing down at those armor plates on Daniel's mummy, the beakish face. Not a species he recognized. "I thought you would need help with the artifacts. Identifying, labeling, plaques (plaques are wonderful, aren't they?). Possibly making sure nothing has any...exploding tendencies."

Safety first! The Doctor trusted Daniel to be obsessive enough to be here who knows how long. He might be also here to make sure the human took care of himself, make sure he ate and drank and did all those human biological things.