Archaeologist discovers 6k year-old island settlement off Croatian coast (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Archaeologist discovers 6k year-old island settlement off Croatian coast (2021)

reuters.com

85 pointsdiodorus17 comments

I wonder what percent of pre historic large settlements have been found? Probably something like 0.1%. That small sample size and the sparse remains will heavily skew our assumptions about how these societies operated.

Yep. The reason that a lot of things are found in caves is because they are more likely to be preserved there. Things/settlements in the open field are more likely to be destroyed over time.

In nearby Albania they found a similar ancient settlements after they drained a swamp back in the 50s-60s. Things were preserved on the bottom of the swamp.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/336925615852463054/

The other major source of findings are tombs and burial sites.

It's not really the Stone Age but rather the "Wood and Bone Age". The stone settlements, monuments, tools etc just survived better.

The sea level was lower then. Encroaching water probably destroyed and scattered a great deal of the material that made up previously-coastal settlements - but perhaps not all. Searching in shallow waters a few hundred meters out from the modern coastline is a good strategy.

Very interesting. Google Maps location if anyone is interested: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.9441039,17.1580705,2202m/dat...

Someone should train an ML model to discover such sites.

Someone should publish frequently updated, high-quality satellite imagery in the public domain.

One can see that one on Google Maps

The best sites are probably 400 feet under water.

No they should not otherwise random thieves and/or idiots will raid the site and destroy the real archeological value ...

They have. Fancy statistical models are getting pretty common. It still requires funding and ground truthing by archaeologists, which are the real bottlenecks.

I mean like telling the computer, “Show me more places that look like this“. Then, getting a bunch of results, saying yes or no to them as potential candidates, and watching the model get better and better showing you examples which you will confirm to be suitable candidates.

The problem is that you have to go examine (dig/dive/whatever) the potential sites to get real feedback -- otherwise, you're just training the model based on your own prejudices about what good sites look like.

True. And by going there, you might improve your understanding of what good candidate sites look like. Then again, having a longer list of candidates to choose from for such missions might still be helpful.

Yes, that's what I said. The term of art is "archaeological predictive modeling", but basically it's just finding statistical correlations between sites and spatial variables like soil type, water availability, etc. It's been around since the 80s, but a more recent example with ML is [1]. The people who find this most useful are heritage organization / BLM types that want to evaluate the "archaeological risk" of developing land without the need to do expensive surveys.

They're not nearly as useful in research archaeology because research is less focused on finding sites similar to what we already know about and more focused on getting an accurate picture of everything, including the sites not captured by traditional survey methodologies. Predictive modeling has a tendency reproduce your input biases, requiring careful management. A good paper that deals with this sort of problem and illustrates the scale of the issue is [2].

[1] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239424

[2] https://doi.org/10.7183/2326-3768.2.3.222

Looks like they are picking a set of variables. That’s a bit like looking at your past girlfriends, picking some of their features (hair color, hobbies), and then trying to predict from that which woman you’re going to fall in love with next. Of course, life will often surprise you in very unexpected ways.

I really just meant looking at satellite images for submerged cities just a few yards offshore, just based on visual similarity.

That happens too. However, archaeology tends to run on budgets that can be generously described as "shoestring". Most of the projects I worked on (some years-long), had total budgets less than half my current tech-company compensation. Since I like to work with older stuff, you can look at the sea level chart [1] and see obvious issue. Submersibles just aren't feasible for most research.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Post-Gla...

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