Can the locals draw a map of these lost cities? Or are they just aware that there are many lost cities, but without knowing exactly where they are?
And for that matter, if the locals did know the specifics but weren't spreading that knowledge, then it still can constitute a discovery.
"Discovery" can mean revealing knowledge that was previously known to insiders, eg. if I say "I discovered an underground smuggling ring and reported it to the police", you probably wouldn't argue that "you didn't discover anything; the smugglers already knew about it".
>"Discovery" can mean revealing knowledge that was previously known to insiders, eg. if I say "I discovered an underground smuggling ring and reported it to the police", you probably wouldn't argue that "you didn't discover anything; the smugglers already knew about it".
Just wanted to say how much I'm enjoying this point.
Newspaper Headline:
Discoverer of Underground Smuggling Ring Proven a Fraud: Ring Leader Says He Discovered It First"
Wow archaeology should be rife for disruption if you can just go around and ask locals. Seems like anyone with gumption could be the next great scientist.
Or maybe one of those locals could be. I wonder what stops them?
> Or maybe one of those locals could be. I wonder what stops them?
They're living their lives, rarely becoming academics in the relevant field, assuming that local rock ruin is known to somebody outside of their community, or if not, then assuming nobody cares anyway.
You can probably find a lot of undocumented ancient stuff by asking shepherds in areas known to be territory of ancient poorly documented civilizations.
What is the proportion of villages where surveying the locals will lead to documenting an abandoned city that is otherwise only known to the locals?
If only 2% of villages have an undiscovered profitable heritage, then 98% of surveys will show no results, which makes it difficult for anthropological surveys to compete with lidar for grant funding, especially when lidar is still new enough to seem "sexy" and "sci-fi".
To put into context how few funding dollars there are in archaeology, the NEH currently has $800k available for archaeological field research proposals. That's the largest "funding agency" pool for generic field research.
This same funding agency that doesn't directly fund computer research also has $2.5M available for proposals specifically targeted to starting collaborations researching AI alignment. They have another $3.5M for the actual collaborations themselves, and an additional $2.2M for AI work that "contributes to scholarly research in the humanities".
How about “discovered it for the world at large” I think there have been many cases where the locals knew about a lost city or even took stones for their farms from it for X purposes. Still it lets the government there know about a new lost city they can properly check out (or leave alone)
"Discovery" probably isn't the right word, but the important part isn't knowing that something is there, the important part is telling the rest of the world about it.
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If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.