Lost cities / archaeology / ancient history

You remind me that I once met an archaeologist who had worked there. I remember what he told me as very interesting.

I think that the significance of sites is always determined by their status within what we have found. I'm sure that Bouldnor Cliff is a rich site, but the wealth of archaeological deposits pretty much everywhere is so vast (you just have to look at the stuff on rock art a little further up) that in areas of little knowledge, which includes most of underwater archaeology, I prefer to think of sites as primarily graded by their accessibility, and only secondarily by their significance in relation to the overall. I mean, today the best-known archaeologically-explored civilisations are probably ancient Egypt and the Maya, but even in land-based stuff we don't know yet whether we might find something even more spectacular.

Vincent Gaffney asks a rhetorical question in the above podcast: 'Where else could you find ancient river systems and a lost landscape?' (paraphrasing slightly) Quite simply--on land, e.g. under the current Sahara. I found this quite intriguing considering that Dogger Bank is a mass of sediment heaped up over an ancient landscape, just as the sand in the Sahara is heaped up over what is now beginning to be explored more by means of remote sensing (and where evidence of ancient rivers and a probably fertile landscape has been found), just like Doggerland.

Anyway, it's all uncountable little mosaic pieces to put together.