I want to ask a dumb question: if it was known that this area was high traffic, why are archaeologists only just now discovering these wrecks? Is it not obvious to search this area for wrecks given its history? The article hints that climate change is increasing urgency. Is the case here that we knew there should be wrecks here, but climate change made the search happen?
I've actually had this conversation before with an archeologist with some naval archeology experience.
Shipwreck hunting is ridiculously expensive. The resources required to exhaustively explore 100 sqm of space is probably 1000x of the resources required to do it on land. There aren't any easy shortcuts: radar doesn't work underwater, sonar does but is extremely low resolution, lidar works pretty well but only if the water is very shallow and clear, underwater drones have extremely limited mobility and communication capability. A lot of funding in archeology tends to go to easier or higher probability wins, which has mostly been aerial lidar in heavy vegetation areas for the past 10-15 years.
The best shipwreck hunters rely almost entirely on probabilistic models for where they might find shipwrecks, and the most useful probabilistic models have all developed in the last 30-40 years. In fact, some of the best probabilistic models like Bayesian Search Theory actually originated as a formalization of heuristics that were already used in treasure/shipwreck hunting.
In that respect, I would argue that this find is actually the result of recent advances in probabilistic modeling (along with other advances in data engineering with respect to extremely messy historical data sources) that have just barely gotten accurate enough to start getting the funding it needs to do the harder work of actually working on the sea floor.
It's also worth remembering how little money goes into archaeology in general.
I can think of two nationally-significant archaeological sites in Central Europe - both were partially excavated about fifty years ago, to varying but fairly limited degrees, and then gently reburied, because there wasn't enough money to keep things going.
The site of one has a poorly-trafficked tourist centre today, the other is a clearing with nothing more than a tourist plaque. Both are likely candidates for previous capital cities, so they are obviously significant, but the money just isn't there to do anything about them. I seem to recall reading somewhere that over 90% of one of the sites remains unexcavated.
These are land sites, so relatively inexpensive compared to sea sites. If this is how willing we are to fund nationally-significant land digs, I imagine sea archaeology would be comparatively even more impossible to fund.
Yes exactly. I'll add that most shipwreck discoveries haven't actually been discovered by archeologists, they've been discovered either by amateur divers by accident, or by treasure hunters, who by default only seek after specific ships with known cargo. It's just too expensive for academic archeology organizations to pursue. Take away the quest for profit, and almost nothing gets discovered, no matter how historically significant.
I suppose this is an area where amateurs can help out. I live near the Great Lakes. Once in the while, amateur divers will discover a new shipwreck. It's like the way that amateur astronomers used to look for comets with the hope of being the first to report one.
Divers almost never just randomly find a shipwreck underwater. Usually they'll spot some kind of object on sonar first, then dive to check it out.
in Italy there are "archeological groups"[0] which are amateurs that mostly help with maintaining and popularizing archeological findings.
I think actually excavating stuff is beyond their purvue tho.
[0] https://gruppiarcheologici.org/
Are the location names and country a secret you are trying to keep?
Lidar does work well at depth:
https://voyis.com/projects-endurance/
Endurance is 3000m down.
You have to get the lidar down to the scan range, which they do with drones. The effective scan range of that particular lidar model is 1.5 to 15 meters. Compare that to 1000+m for aerial lidar. That means that they had to get the scanners to extremely low depths and were using very expensive drones, and the process was still extremely slow. They still had to target the search area using probabilistic models based off of available historical records, as a general search would have been way too expensive.
Are there open source examples of this? I'm not treasure hunting, just curious what sort of data they use, etc.
SS Central America, sunk in 1857 with 14,000 kg of gold.."the old insurance companies who’d paid out when the original ship demanded, and were rewarded, in court a substantial amount of the gold recovered." https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/interviews/how-f...
Search for the SS Central America: Mathematical Treasure Hunting, Lawrence D. Stone https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247823555_Search_fo...
Another solution: train wild dolphins to recognize the goal (e.g. sunken ships), do the scan for you, and receive some compensation in exchange for the work they do (tasty food? play balls?). Should check the depth range of dolphins.
Somebody investing a zillion to hire people to train and feed dolphins most probably:
1) have enough money to buy robots instead and get rid of the legal and logistic trouble
2) would want to use the dolphins for activities that grant a better return of the investment like marine engineering or war (mining/demining).
Every major of a coastal city in California, or South-Africa (with a big beach visited by thousands of swimmers a day), would pay solid money for bay-watching and shark deterrent services that really work without the need of eyesore nets. People love to swim with dolphins too so would be another tourism resource in itself.
The time of your dolphins would be just too valuable and expensive to do Archaeology.
While I can't speak for these wrecks specifically, archeology as a field is chronically underfunded. They have to pick and choose their battles.
That's the main reason. Also marine archeology is expensive. I once heard an archeologist saying that if the rests have passed centuries underwater, one more is less harmful than looters.
Underwater sites are particularly harder to protect from looters than above / underground sites. If the stakes are high enough, scuba diving is a reasonable option for the criminally minded.
It wasn’t long before Costa Concordia was looted for its treasures.
> It wasn’t long before Costa Concordia was looted for its treasures.
What treasures were there, panties of Francesco's Moldavian lover?
Passengers possessions - e.g. jewelry, watches. Technical equipment on the ship. Items from the on-ship shops. Interesting artefacts (ships bells are often a prized loot from wrecks).
grew up around there, honestly, just not much going on other than bored rich folk and poor folk trying to make a living.
There are VASTLY more interesting archeological sites than the world has resources to investigate!
Yes, the priorities are rather to invest into expensive hardware, to blow up interesting archeological sites.
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