[Damocles]

Originally Posted by WarMachine

I am en route to bed, but I wanted to answer a couple of these.....


....Sure -- usually, as in almost always, by sheer accident. The vast majority of manmade ships exist in what amounts to a sea of solvent. Even the steel-hulls under Truk lagoon will vanish in c.1000yrs; we might be able to find them if we know what we're looking for, but even that's a stretch....

1. Seapower is seapower. You understand that, you go where the ocean chokepoints and the sheltered anchorages are. You dive for wrecks there as that is where the storms and naval battles sink ships.

That's not the point. The fact that you would look at it and know what it is automatically marks it as site-contamination for an archeologist...and no matter how hard you argure that test 'X' places it's construction at 13000BC, the archeologist will pat you on the head, and tell you that the very science that he relies on to date his material is flatly wrong when it comes to your swash plate -- because, as a certain curator once said, "...What are you left with? You have Culture A -- Culture B -- and nothing in between. Where's the link?"...assuming that the unwashed peasants will never once question whether Culture B might actually be Culture G......

2. Refer back to what I said about satellites previously? The gonzo archaeologist might not know it is a helicopter swash plate; but he would know it was a forged casting and he would ask me. Then I would talk to a metallurgist buddy of mine and he would test it for composition. That would tell us;
-a Is it cast the way we would do it? There are several methods for doing this-(American and European methods differ significantly.) Something he wouldn't recognize(or I wouldn't recognize fot that matter as a contemporary working process) would immediately give greater emphasis to b.
-b What is its composition?
http://www.efunda.com/materials/allo...properties.cfm
Anything that doesn't fall into that range will set the alarm bells off, not only in archaeology; but, across all scientific disciplines. Dating that swash plate would be the first thing we would desperately attempt. And it would be only the first question we would ask. That poor archaeologist would be snowed under by the avalanch of investigators that swarmed him for information as to what he did to find the artifact, and asking him how could he be so stupid as to SCREW the dig up.

Not sure of your point, here. Everyone assumed that stories of El Dorado were fables, until air-surveys of the Amazon basin confirmed a far higher population count - complete with a massive road and canal network - than anyone previously believed....

My point is that what we regard as myth is often mis-interpreted legend.

THERA=Atlantis?

Oh, that's not true at all...The only reason the Baghdad Battery didn't get tossed in the trash at Square One was that it didn't have Duracell® printed on it; in fact, IIRC, archeologists couldn't figure out what it was -- it took an electrical engineer with an archeology hobby working in the British Museum to figure it out...They hadn't even run a simple chemical analysis on their samples, which would have revealed the acids...Also, remember the Antikthera[sp?] Mechanism - now proven to be part of the gearing of a highly advanced astrolabe[sp?], c.1800yrs old - was nearly tossed as salt.....

Those artifacts turned up and were correctly analyzed despite the long odds aginst that happening . Oddly enough the Baghdad Battery was recovered from a pottery dump, so I guess you could say it was thrown out with the trash.

As for the Antikythera Astrolabe?

http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~tony/whatsnew/column/antikytheraI-0400/kyth1.html

Surprise! It was recovered from a sunken ship!

Think of that bronze mechanical ballistic computer aboard the U.S.S. Chicago under similar conditions.

Bronze is less corrosive than steel.

http://www.navsource.org/archives/04/04029.htm

Now I know that steel corrodes, but there will be gun barrels and barbette housings left of the Arizona for millenia as well as for

Repulse
Prince of Wales
Hood
Bismarck
Scharnhorst
Musashi
Hiei
Kirishima
and those wrecks
Akagi
Soryu
Hiryui
Kaga
are just chock full of bronze and aluminum artifacts as well as steel ones.

Just off the top of my head there is enough sunk shipping within the last hundred years(37 million tons) to keep divers busy for that ten thousand years you extrapolate.

Any ancient civilization that leaves that kind of footprint is going to be obvious if for nothing else for all the wrecks that screw up navigation by magnetic compass.

Somebody would dive to see what was down there throwing off magnetic north!