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I mentioned Bouldnor Cliff because I worked on it a great deal! Bouldnor changed the chronology of European prehistory; when it was first discovered, what it came to be acknowledges as was so radical that it was dismissed as impossible.
I’m not quite sure what you’re saying here:
“I prefer to think of sites as primarily graded by their accessibility, and only secondarily by their significance in relation to the overall.”
Some of the most inaccessible sites could be the most significant; I’ve dived to -100m looking for evidence of prehistoric coastlines and early human dispersal. Such landscapes are very hard to access at the current sea level, yet are hugely important. Indeed, in areas where the interior landscape was inhospitable, those coastal areas would have need the most accessible and heavily exploited.
ljmorgan-
I’m not quite sure what you’re saying here:
“I prefer to think of sites as primarily graded by their accessibility, and only secondarily by their significance in relation to the overall.”
Ah, sorry, that wasn't clear--what I meant was that more accessible sites have a much easier time at being 'significant' than very inaccessible sites. I'm sure the work at Bouldnor Cliff was groundbreaking, but its significance is caused by the fact that it was possible to do the work there, which was in large part caused by its relative accessibility (as in its proximity to shore, to a large population centre, etc.). Whether it will remain significant as a fuller big picture emerges I don't know, but I think it's unlikely that what we're finding at the moment is going to remain significant given the potential for bigger and more sensational finds, apart from its important role in the advancement of the discipline.
I mentioned Bouldnor Cliff because I worked on it a great deal! Bouldnor changed the chronology of European prehistory; when it was first discovered, what it came to be acknowledged as was so radical that it was dismissed as impossible.
Yes, to scientists who only follow the evidence it must have been that. I'm not a scientist, just an amateur who likes to speculate on very little evidence. I've long thought (like most archaeologists, too, I'm sure) that we've barely scratched the surface, and some of the work that needs to be done in scratching further is to overcome some of the prejudices that arose from earlier work, a bit like how palaeontologists used to put dinosaur bits together wrongly. In particular, I've long suspected that estimates of ancient populations are often much too low, that we (not all of us) underestimate how much humans were affected by disasters in the past, and that some of the assumptions we have about the progress of history are much too linear, because there, too, there was a lot of progress and regression, and so forth.
I also think that the immense length of time that we're talking about makes it very unlikely that certain kinds of technology weren't invented very early on somewhere--obviously not in some mad UFOs-visiting-the-Maya--and then lost again for a long time, with technology waxing and waning, and I think we'll continue to make surprising discoveries on the technological side, things like the Antikythera mechanism, or much more evidence of non-gold metalworking in the Stone Ages, probably usually confined to relatively small areas, and perhaps lost again before eventually being rediscovered and spread further on a greater scale. What I'm actually most curious about from these times is forms of government, but evidence of that is almost impossible to find or conceive of, of course.
Some of the most inaccessible sites could be the most significant; I’ve dived to -100m looking for evidence of prehistoric coastlines and early human dispersal. Such landscapes are very hard to access at the current sea level, yet are hugely important. Indeed, in areas where the interior landscape was inhospitable, those coastal areas would have need the most accessible and heavily exploited.
Yes, that's what I meant. Such sites will be overwhelmingly significant, we just haven't discovered most of them yet. We know of quite a few ancient cities lost to the sea, but there must be so many more. There are some sites off the coast of India that may have been huge cities once upon a time, but they haven't been surveyed properly yet. Hopefully, there, too, remote sensing will play a big role.
Oliver Schick
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.