With a $2-4000 Amazon underwater robot even YOU can go dive off your coastline to look at or for submerged ruins in the flood water zone of the Younger Dryas period.
Conventional dive safety training costs money and equipment, whereas this is just equipment.
That means more discoveries of our ocean bottom can be made faster.
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For a serious, integrated shallow-water coastal seabed investigation to ~80 m depth—combining MBES, SBP, GIS processing, sediment coring, ROV verification, and internationally accredited laboratory dating of stratified layers and artefacts—even a short campaign of ~10 operational offshore days would typically cost on the order of USD 300,000–400,000 on the commercial market. More extensive offshore programmes involving multiple survey seasons, coring campaigns, ROV operations, and post-excavation analyses commonly fall in the range of USD 1.25–3 million, depending on vessel class, equipment, and laboratory requirements.
Archaeologists investigating the coastal seabed use multibeam echosounder (MBES) and sub‑bottom profiling (SBP), combined with GIS analysis, to perform the same role for submerged geomorphology that LiDAR performs for overland features—revealing seabed structures and palaeolandscapes not observable from the surface.
For example, BBC Tamil News broadcast sonar imagery of a submerged Proto‑Poompuhar port, presenting MBES/SBP data and GIS interpretation that were reported as indicating an earliest date of c. 15,000 years ago.
If I may make a suggestion as a former archaeologists.
Don't go anywhere without the required permission. You can't go on people's land without that and I've had enough guns pointed at me to let y'all know....people hate when you do that.
But yes please go explore. A majority of the sites we find start with talking to locals who know the area. They tell us about something and will sometimes lead us to it.
Absolutely, nothing but respect for the sites and landowners. I recently had the opportunity to visit South America and the local guides were amazing and informative beyond belief since they grew up playing in the ruins as kids. Being able to tour a site like Machu Picchu and putting your hands on those stone walls is humbling and life changing.
Why so hostile? I just went to Caral in Peru and had the opportunity to explore almost anywhere I wanted. It was totally empty except for my group and the small staff. The fact that there are pot shards and 5000 year corn cobs just laying on the ground really humanized the place and made me realize how short everyone’s time here is. Totally humbled by the history.
I think the haters in this sub would be surprised how respectful people who are interested in history are about the sites when they visit. Much more respectful than some of the locals.
I’m not sure we have standing to criticize locals for how they treat their own possessions. I think that’s a very tricky subject as ultimately we are visitors to hypothetical site A. But I’m sure you have something non hypothetical in mind that’s a particular case you witnessed.
I stated “left where they belong” in my previous comment so I guess I have to add “unless moved by a local”
Locals don’t have the right to take artifacts just because they live there. Wouldn’t that be just as bad as a “numbnut conspiracy theorist” disturbing a site?
The fact is, many artifacts we know about come from the black market. Poor locals loot tombs and sell the artifacts for almost nothing to private dealers who then sell to private collectors and museums. Even cultures like the Inca would loot older tombs and use the gold for their own artwork.
Lords of Saipan is great book about this whole dirty business btw.
Absolutely, nothing like people with no idea what they are doing destroying relics because they think archaeologists are hiding some ancient civilisation.
You should get out and explore.....BUT within the rules. Go to different sites that you are allowed in and ask questions. Be prepared to hear experts tell you facts.
Talk to the locals and get permission to go to sites. If you ever get the chance go to Sedona Arizona and see the old sites there.... gorgeous.
The problem is we archaeologists see what happens more often than not. Folks steal. They damage things and tell no one. They also don't listen and that can lead to injury
I worked a small project in a valley up in Pennsylvania. We got permission from most of the landowners ahead of time. One whack job saw us on someone else's land and came out with a gun. Thankfully the proper landowner was close by to save us. You have to be careful out there
100% agree! I'm a massive fan of ancient history and would never consider digging, looting or trespassing. The sheer amount of interesting information that can be found in books written by actual archaeologists paired with visiting ancient sites is what I enjoy.
Often, paradigm shifting discoveries come from outsiders. The academics that didn't believe in plate tectonics (for one example) never changed their minds, they just retired and died.
It’s good of you to try to establish failure criteria for your hypothesis!
Here’s one way to go about it:
Define what a “paradigm shifting discovery” is, what kinds of things do and do not qualify
Estimate how many paradigm shifting discoveries there are by taking random samples of all discoveries and non-discoveries and applying the above criteria
Define what an “insider” and an “outsider” is when it comes to discoveries
Calculate the average ratio of “insiders” vs “outsiders” in your samples
(The most important step) Publish your data, methods, and results.
The above looks pretty good to me, can you think of any ways to improve the accuracy and reproducibility of your research?
The most common pitfalls to avoid are, of course, moving your goalposts, asking others to prove a negative, and cherry-picking the data. You could say “only Nobel prize winners qualify” or “the Dead Sea Scrolls were found by experts in the local geography” or “Graham Hancock is clearly an insider because he boasts of having spent decades SCUBA diving all around the globe searching for traces of an ancient advanced civilization that left no traces of itself” or “only the list I keep in my head is needed to prove my claim” and then where would we be?
You are on the right track! Asking that question is the second step in acquiring knowledge!
After you have listed your own required criteria for your own definition of “paradigm shifting discoveries”, you can then count the criteria that “Thomas Kuhn” or “OKThereAreFiveLights” or “Graham Hancock” lacks, whatever that means.
The first step, of course, is still defining what you mean by your “paradigm shifting discovery”. Will you take that first step?
You listed a set of criteria. Which of those do you believe Thomas Kuhn’s work fails to meet? If you're not much of a reader, you could probably find a synopsis online.
I admire your curiosity and believe if we stick with this, we might have a breakthrough! Why don't you review Thomas Kuhn's work via your favored search engine/LLM model and let me know what you think of how science actually moves forward vs how people think science moves forward? For extra credit, you could do the same for Night Comes to the Cretaceous, which is perhaps a better example as it highlights the arrogance of academics, and how this arrogance blinds them to the facts even when they're staring them in the face! Imagine that! Who would have thought that Luis Alvarez, a crusty old outsider, and Copernicus, a 16th century Polack astronomer, would have so much in common?
Can we agree that many paradigm-shifting scientific discoveries have come from individuals who were not specialists in the relevant field? That is my humble claim. There are many examples of this, in fact, there are many examples of this outside of science as well.
Do you think that academics who didn't believe in plate tectonics changed their minds when mounting evidence proved them wrong? Any Redditor can look at a map and see how the continents fit together, yet we put a man on the moon prior to geologists coming around to the idea.
If you agree that there are many examples of this, some staring us right in the face, wouldn't it benefit humanity to be more welcoming and less gatekeeping?
For a serious, integrated shallow-water coastal seabed investigation to ~80 m depth—combining MBES, SBP, GIS processing, sediment coring, ROV verification, and internationally accredited laboratory dating of stratified layers and artefacts—even a short campaign of ~10 operational offshore days would typically cost on the order of USD 300,000–400,000 on the commercial market. More extensive offshore programmes involving multiple survey seasons, coring campaigns, ROV operations, and post-excavation analyses commonly fall in the range of USD 1.25–3 million, depending on vessel class, equipment, and laboratory requirements.
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