yellow submarine

[troll]

Greetings to all. Got invited to a seminar last week and got all inspired! The seminar was timed to celebrate the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the USA and Cyprus on the sharing of technological and scientific advances. One of the Institutions here to grasp the opportunity is the Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center (STARC) of the Cyprus Institute. In short, the seminar revealed the latest gadgets and gizmos designed to solve the many and expensive issues involving deep water survey. To run one of the old school submersable jobbies, it involved a support vessel that can cost about 50,000 a day sometimes, endless cables and pipes. MIT and its population of over a thousand PhD level staff have been busy in their little burrows and have come up with a beautiful solution.

Tiz a little yellow torpedo shaped beasty. Packed with all manner of expensive equipment, this thing takes some amazing images, carries out chemical analyses and a host of other tasks as it overflies wreck sites. The quality, depth and mass of recovered data is really exquisite. The best part of this system is that no support vessel is required, no cables and no messing about.One simply programs it, releases it into the water from land and off it goes.It will swim about for eight hours and then bring you the data back. Brilliant! Although the archaeologist at MIT using this technology (the only archaeologist amongst a thousand scientists!) is primarily targetting wreck sites, I would love to see this beasty being used to find and record Palaeo/Meso and Neolithic sites under water. The clarity of data this technology is capable of is just out of this world and I want one!!!:face-approve:

..knowledge without action is insanity and action without knowledge is vanity..(imam ghazali,ayyuhal-walad)

[uncle andy]

has it got a vacuum powered sieve for artefact recovery, and can it fit into submerged rockshelters?

[Smaze]

Sounds greats---but i'll be the voice of doom and gloom...bet you on its third trip out it gets snaged in the remains of a ripped fishing net and needs recovering :-)

[troll]

Greetings all! Its been out and about for a while now and so far, no fishing nets and no neat images of a basking sharks large intestine either! The idea at the moment is to map targetted wrecks and provide fairly good dates for them based on artefact typologies identified through high-res imaging. One idea in the pipeline is to map the entire Meditteranean (live here but can`t spell it) to give us a more complete picture of trade links and concomittant exchange of cultural ideologies. During the process, wrecks of particular interest or rarity can be targetted and excavations planned. I heard yesterday about the new Google "Ocean" software and if this was spliced into the sub, a whole new world could open up! Exciting stuff. Now where`s me snorkel....:face-approve:

..knowledge without action is insanity and action without knowledge is vanity..(imam ghazali,ayyuhal-walad)