[HN Gopher] Archaeologist discovers 6k year-old island settlemen...
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Archaeologist discovers 6k year-old island settlement off Croatian
coast (2021)
Author : diodorus
Score : 72 points
Date : 2022-06-25 16:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| wefarrell wrote:
| 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.
| danjac wrote:
| It's not really the Stone Age but rather the "Wood and Bone
| Age". The stone settlements, monuments, tools etc just survived
| better.
| ardit33 wrote:
| 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.
| jl6 wrote:
| 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.
| jq-r wrote:
| Very interesting. Google Maps location if anyone is interested:
| https://www.google.com/maps/@42.9441039,17.1580705,2202m/dat...
| leobg wrote:
| Someone should train an ML model to discover such sites.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| They have. Fancy statistical models are getting pretty common.
| It still requires funding and ground truthing by
| archaeologists, which are the real bottlenecks.
| leobg wrote:
| 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.
| gdavisson wrote:
| 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.
| leobg wrote:
| 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.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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
| leobg wrote:
| 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.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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...
| lazyjones wrote:
| Someone should publish frequently updated, high-quality
| satellite imagery in the public domain.
| ldng wrote:
| No they should not otherwise random thieves and/or idiots
| will raid the site and destroy the real archeological value
| ...
| leobg wrote:
| One can see that one on Google Maps
| treeman79 wrote:
| The best sites are probably 400 feet under water.
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