Scuba diver accidentally discovers prehistoric industrial complex in Mexico

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/08/what-roman-ruins-rev...

I think the point I was trying to make is that there clearly are examples and I don't think that we've barely even begun looking.

You're right that healthy sea waters aren't ideal for preservation of human-derived metals and organics, but then silting and run-off from tributaries leads to preserving types of environment, sat in geographic areas of interest to humans anyway. That aside, stone - a material much used in ancient times - is fairly durable.

When you were diving, were you actively looking for signs of ancient human activity, or might it have entirely slipped you by even if you stared straight at it?

I'd suggest the littoral region is the next frontier of archaeology, because clearly a lot of our history was on-shore, and that on-shore is now off-shore... .

- ed spelling

When you consider that the flood myth is almost a universal story across cultures, and that human population was dramatically smaller, and left behind little, it’s difficult to Have a position on pre-history.

I recall taking classes on this era in college, and the professor spending time talking about what we don’t know — which highlighted the importance of small details of ancient cultures that allow us to infer knowledge.

In the last 30-40 years more discoveries have been made that challenge even our understanding of Ancient Greece, we’re learning and eventually people will reach consensus about new discoveries.

There's a pretty big divide here between what archaeologists/anthropologists say to the public and how they interact within their communities. There's a lot of reasons for this that I'm more than happy to go into (e.g. preventing looting, caution about the use of our works to justify bigotry, or simply because there's a lot we don't know). This essentially manifests as "the safest thing to communicate is the basic consensus." It's also the easiest thing to provide layperson accessible resources for. Internally though, the fields are quite aggressive about challenging popular narratives. That's pretty much the best way to make a name as a young researcher and grad classes tend to settle into a debate format, where you take turns trying to rip (sometimes each other's) arguments apart.

Secondly, if we're going to point out issues in an entire field, it helps to be specific. No one can actually respond to the assertion that "archaeologists don't talk about things I haven't named." Like, do I list a bunch of things that have been rewritten over time?

Finally, archaeology is hard and the record just doesn't answer a lot of the questions we want it to. The field as a whole is moving back from resolving big questions and producing grand narratives to answering little questions and small narratives the record allows us to support. These aren't the things the public asks about, so there's quite a large gap mostly filled by the kind of people too ignorant to realize why there's a gap. The challenge that we need to do a better job filling it was Jared Diamond's most interesting idea, in my opinion.

The trouble is the lack of writing. Even when there is writing, there was mass illiteracy, people may not have written much, and what books and accounts that were written were lost.

This is true for about all civilizations up until the printing press. Consider how little we know about the Vikings, Arthurian England, etc.

Even if they could be fully autonomous, there's still a bunch of issues, since caves in general and submerged ones in particular are GPS-denied environments. Acoustics like USBL equipment probably wouldn't work in a cave, instances of underwater VSLAM are still pretty nascent, and inertial navigation system with a low-enough error accumulation rate are almost universally export-controlled by their respective countries.

It's definitely an interesting problem, though, and I honestly think that progress in the area is going to be made because folks that aren't experts in caving end up getting interested in it. For example, I'd imagine this kind of a problem is something that space agencies are also really interested in, since there's a lot room in the middle of their respective Venn diagrams.

Stone's DepthX AUV is a fully autonomous unit that was intended as a proof of concept for mapping Jupiter's moon Europa. https://stoneaerospace.com/depthx/

That said, proper training and equipment can not eliminate a lot of the risk involved. Equipment can always fail, people can get stuck, and the environment is often such that a single minor wrong movement will causes clear water to become instantly zero visibility. Diving in old mines has also risk of collapse and unless you are diving rebreather you are also introducing new air into the environment.

Exploring a new unexplored mine like the one in the article is risky even for the most trained and well equipped divers.

That said, do you know of a more current layman-accessible book on the topic?

I'm the one that mentioned him elsewhere in the thread. It's sad to me that he gets so much shit in scientific circles when he's quite reserved with making truth claims, instead making hypotheses that are unfortunately misaligned with current theories and so derided as pseudo-science or bullshit.