Slashdot Mirror
Oldest Submerged City Visualized With CGI
Stirling Newberry writes "Nottingham University's Pavlopetri project spent months measuring a city that sank beneath the waves 3,000 years ago, perhaps in a tsunami. The result is a BBC documentary that features a detailed CGI reconstruction. 'The entire city – covering 20 acres – has been surveyed in ultra-high definition, with error margins of less than three centimeters. ... [T]he survey team has so far located scores of buildings, half a dozen major streets and even religious shrines and tombs.' eScience News chimes in about the oldest known submerged city, first inhabited 5,000 years ago and rediscovered in 1967. Of course, Slashdot readers will probably want to dig into the details of how stereo-vision mapping was used (PDF) to create the map in the first place."
And then that guy proceeded to utterly ruin the city, smashing through all the upper layers without even pretending to analyze or catalogue them in search of the gold or whatever he expected to find at the bottom.
I forget the exact details, but I know he trashed damn near 90% of the place; even by the looser standards of the 1800's he was a reckless, arrogant fuck. His own partner castigated him for his methods. It must have been inspirational for archeologists I suppose, to know that great things were still out there, but it quickly became one of the bigger archeological tragedies man has ever witnessed.