Spanish archaeologists discover trove of ancient shipwrecks in Bay of Gibraltar | Hacker News Reader

Spanish archaeologists discover trove of ancient shipwrecks in Bay of Gibraltar

theguardian.com

129 points165944709139 comments

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?

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).

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.

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.

Are the location names and country a secret you are trying to keep?

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

...Don't those services exist already? How does my local zoo have dolphins without zillions of dollars?

Definitely not an expert here, but I was always under the impression that dolphins can only be trained in captivity. If they aren't reliant on you for food, they have no need to perform for you.

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...

grew up around there, honestly, just not much going on other than bored rich folk and poor folk trying to make a living.

The orcas have been sinking boats for longer than we thought.

https://archive.ph/iLzyb

Fun facts, Gibraltar was named after Tariq ibn Ziyad, a famous muslim Berber commander of the Umayyad Caliphate that conquered most of the Spain and some part of French territories in the early 8th century CE [1].

Then after the conquest, came the exiled young Umayyad prince (escaping from by the later Abbasid Caliphate), who settled in Spain to create a long lasting around 800 years (that's more than European living in America now) muslim Spanish empire with its knowledge center in Toledo. This center contains many books translations and also many new books by muslim scholars. Famous books examples including Almagest Arabic translation that was copied and translated further into Latin, and studied by Copernicus and Galileo [2]. Of course they are other muslim astronomy books and ideas that Copernicus and Galileo studied and copied but never cited properly [3].

Another famous book is Muqaddimah by Ibnu-Rushd or Averroes that's widely considered as the very first work dealing with the social sciences of sociology, demography and cultural history [4].

This center was later captured in 11th century CE, and this event essentially started the Western Renaissance movement in Europe.

Legend has it, in order to motivate his troops, Tariq ordered to scuttle their entire ships armada, before advancing into Spain [5]. Perhaps some of the sinked ships are part of Tariq's original armada, but these ships were intentionally sinked not by accidents.

His act of bravery were copied and followed by later Spanish conquerers but as usual it's not been properly credited to Tariq's original efforts [6].

[1] Tariq ibn Ziyad:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariq_ibn_Ziyad

[2] Galileo's handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text (42 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263938

[3] Islamic Astronomy and Copernicus [pdf]:

(https://www.tuba.gov.tr/files/yayinlar/bilim-ve-dusun/TUBA-9...)

[4] Muqaddimah of Ibnu Khaldin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah

[5] The Legend of Tariq ibn Ziyad and the Burning of Ships:

https://arabic-for-nerds.com/islam/conquest-andalus/

[6] Richard A. Luecke - Scuttle Your Ships before Advancing: And Other Lessons from History.

> 800 years (that's more than European living in America now) muslim Spanish empire with its knowledge center in Toledo

The Muslim dominion of the Iberian Peninsula did not last 800 years. The Muslim invasion started in 711 CE, and by 1085 Toledo has fallen back to the Christian kingdom of León. Granada would eventually be conquered in 1492, but most of the old Visigothic Kingdom was already in the hands of the Christians.

711 AD to 1492 AD is a good 781 years.

But as I said above, that is only true for Granada, not for the rest of what it would become Spain.

It's not like Tariq ibn Ziyad invented the concept of intentionally making a retreat impossible in order to compel soldiers to fight. There are proverbs about this kind of thing that predate him by centuries: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%A0%B4%E9%87%9C%E6%B2%89%E... It's probably a popular story to tell because it raises the stakes and provides for dramatic tension: either the battle is won or the army will be annihilated. But I suspect there've been quite a few unlucky commanders who tried this, got annihilated, and never had their heroism praised in history books.

You can use this technique during job interviews by bringing your own padlock and employment contract, and a rope just in case.

Why a pad lock and rope? Are you hoping to lock yourself in?

> This center was later captured in 11th century CE, and this event essentially started the Western Renaissance movement in Europe.

Islamic contribution within the context of European history should be both acknowledged and recognized as being autoctonous, but attributing to it things that well attested through other pathways works against it and reinforces myths historians are toiling to get rid of.

The Renaissance as we know it was kickstarted by the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 by the French and Italians, that's well documented and broadly agreed on by historians. All of this happened on the foundations laid down from the 11th c. onwards as the post-Carolingian world was stabilized.

This is off topic, but is it legal for websites to ask me to either accept tracking or pay? I thought the GDPR made tracking truly optional.

It is a gray zone. Some national regulatory agencies has said ”pay or consent” is compatible with GDPR and some have said it is not. It hasn’t yet been tested by the EU court.

You can't usually force a business to do business with you (i.e. serve you content, for free) even in the EU

IANAL but the legal argument seems pretty simple to me based on that concept, so I wonder if that's why it hasn't gone to court yet?

Do we as users even want it to? Imagine if the organisations won...

The Guardian is in the UK, but I've seen dialogs like that even on some german sites, so i guess it's legal.

> is it legal for websites to ask me to either accept tracking or pay

It's complicated and actively being ruled on in different ways by different countries.

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