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Comment by travisjungroth | Hacker News Reader

> It's right there, entirely unseen.

I doubt that. I've never heard of an ancient discovery offshore. A thousand years of salt, life and waves will turn most things to mush. These caves do a special job of preserving things. They have little movement, little life and freshwater sections.

Edit: I didn’t do a great job of expressing myself. I’m sure that offshore ancient discoveries have happened (as some replies have pointed out). The comment I replied to seemed to be suggesting that all of our ancient history is just waiting to be discovered off the shore. It’s not. In all the diving I’ve done around the world, in all the treasure hunting stories I’ve read, no one has found anything ancient offshore. (And then I learned about some today)

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The Black Sea was flooded when the narrow section of land the Mediterranean from the sea collapsed (possible origin of Great Flood myths) 12,000 years ago. There are many archaeological sites on the now flooded coast many tells and preserved ships due to the cold, oxygen-free, and salt-free freshwater.

I see someone's mentioned Heraklion/Alexandria, as well as Dogger bank in the North Sea - add to the list Dhaskalio in Greece, Yonaguni in Taiwan, Mahabalipuram and Dwarka in India, as well as ruins in Crete and even the Caribbean (can't find link).

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

Moreso: I think when we start digitally encoding these environments - much as we have over ground in South America, using LIDAR to discover previously unseen, but right in-sight structures such as those of the Maya - we'll realise there's a lot of our old culture not far off.

Drone submersibles with high resolution sonar doing fully-realised coastal scans would, I'm sure, yield hugely interesting results.

- ed: drone wouldn't need to be submersible. that would just be cooler.

22 years ago I worked on a communications relay app to make up one tiny part of a control system for an autonomous submersible used for mapping.

My part was a relatively unimportant add-on - the system relied on a 2400bps acoustic link from the submersible to a small ship that needed to stay right above to get a reliable link.

To allow relaying data real-time to shore or a bigger ship nearby I was contracted to write code to pass the data stream reliably over a 9600bps GSM data connection (it was intended for testing and demos in coastal regions, not for production use).

Ended up using a slightly modified z-modem protocol that kept the session alive across redial.

But the best part of that contract was to get to go out and see the real system in operation.

Given what results they had back then I wonder what the state of the art in that field looks like now - the biggest problem with automating this seemed to be the tight tolerances for communication with the submersible.

You won't be able to make it small and cheap if it needs to be tethered (dragging a heavy cable), but if untethered like the one I got to see, maintaining a reliable enough and fast enough connection becomes a challenge instead.

Heracleion was the primary Egyptian port before the development of Alexandria, and was discovered offshore of Alexandria in 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleion

The Doggerland portion of the North Sea has yielded prehistoric artifacts.

Roman fish farms!

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

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