Sometimes, students and colleagues at conferences ask me how a farm girl from rural Kansas grew up to study shipwrecks. It's a reasonable question, but to answer it requires going back in time a little—first a generation, then a geological era. Despite having also grown up on that same farm, my father was a Seabee in the US Navy, and given that I was born on a Virginia Navy base before moving back to my family's homestead in Kansas as a toddler, I spent the first couple years of my life breathing salty air. Maybe this natal exposure to oceanic natrium even led me back to the shores of the Atlantic, on either side of which I’ve been living for the last several years.

But despite all this skirting of the Atlantic, there's also an undeniable—if latent—oceanic force deep within the prairie. This force silently swells up from the vast flatness of the limestone. Riddled with monstrous fossils, the calcareous limestone was formed in the Mesozoic era when Kansas was an inland sea. Where there once was saltwater and unimaginable creatures in it, there now grow tall grasses and grains that, while concealing more imaginable creatures, undulate against a seemingly infinite horizon. In Kansas, uncannily, the ancient sea is ever-present.

The current Neoliberal Empire follows dutifully in the steps of its predecessors: ‘beginning with the Iberians, and clear through the long twentieth century, one of the first things great empires and states do is establish new ways of mapping, categorizing, and surveying the world’. And thus its methods of cloning colonial footprints are also innovative. Shipwreck detection mechanisms have, until now, always been waterborne: divers, fishers, deepwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), the green wavelength of bathymetric LiDAR, and the ‘tow-fish’ that encase sonar transducers and magnetometers pulled by a vessel through calm, shallow waters. But now, even shipwrecks secreted away in turbid nearshore waters can be detected and mapped from the air, by satellite. Reporting from on high, NASA Landsat imagery spots plumes of particulate matter and scour pits that indicate wreck sites, adding validity to the rough estimate of some three million shipwrecks located within global waterways.

Even data constrained to miniscule slivers of time and space reveal how populous shipwrecks are and have been. Recent research by the Spanish Ministry of Culture has logged 681 Spanish ships that wrecked along the Eastern Seaboard of the Americas from 1492, starting with Christopher Columbus's Santa María off Hispaniola, to 1898, with the demise of numerous Spanish ships off the coast of Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

Shipwrecks are often understood, even by specialists who excavate them, as little more than dead ships. They are things to salvage, scraping from the seabed the artifacts worth studying or selling. Salvage operations might be likened to underwater grave robbing, and indeed, academic archaeologists often do draw this comparison. By contrast, archaeologists see their own positions as less salvor and more savior. That is, nautical archaeologists practice a kind of resurrection, returning the shipwreck to the elevated status of the ship. This practice, whether achieved through a literal ‘raising’ of the ship or by way of the virtual resurrection, assumes that the wrecked ship's rightful place is among the living—that is, living humans. Both forms of academic resurrection work on the human savior's assumption that the shipwreck was in need of intervention to begin with, or that its sheer existence is somehow incomplete as is. In other words, a ship is dead when it ceases to serve human needs, but life can be reinstated by granting it a new form and function as tourist attraction, public outreach initiative, cultural heritage token, or research subject. Ostensibly, humans have the power to build ships, sink them, and resurrect them, asserting absolute control over these objects’ destinies.

As functionally liminal works of architecture, traditional sailing ships hold a special place within the human imaginary. Envisioning a ship disappearing into the horizon is to envision standing on the threshold between life and death. All ships, like all other bodies, eventually fail, and only a small fraction of those broken vessels becomes subject to scientific enquiry. Like intrepid, colonizing seafarers on a ‘heart-of-darkness journey into the watery, mineral uterus of Mother Earth’, nautical archaeologists act soteriologically as architects of ruins in their attempts to rebuild ships from shipwrecks. This act of architectural salvation, this mimicry of creatio ex profundis, is presented here as the fusion of two Christological concepts: firstly, that of God as Divine Architect, a popular Medieval trope revitalized within Protestantism by John Calvin in 1536; and secondly, the utopian reconstruction of the Holy City after the utter annihilation of the sea, as described in the book of Revelation.

This book hopes to find its place among the growing body of literature that challenges the conceptual dualisms established in European Renaissance thought and which, through processes of colonialism and neocolonialism, have impacted human behavioral ethics on a global scale. The old binary bones are deserving of such contention. The ecological consequences of dualistic thinking so prevalent in Western discourse, of course, could not likely have been prognosticated by Kant or Descartes, whose separations of mind and body have reverberated into the rifting of existence itself into a series of antonyms. Even so, these philosophers’ dialectics of bifurcation, in combination with the unique missionary quality of Western culture and the Enlightenment metaphor of Earth as machine, have contributed enormously to the ecological crisis that some humans have been inflicting upon everyone composing Earth's biomass. Early Modern shipwrecks may seem to have little to do with any of this, but prior to wreckage, they were the mechanisms of European colonialism and the globalization that portended contemporary neoliberalism. And yet, this book is neither analysis nor narration of those mechanisms—not the galleons, frigates, caravels, and carracks, nor the conquistadors, crusaders, and pilgrims sailing them.

In this book, I have argued that archaeologists tend to view shipwrecks as dead ships, as once active, vibrant things made inert through irreparable bodily harm. Because Western science is a function of Christian theology, even the agnostic archaeologist understands dead ships as awaiting resurrection from the seafloor, which places the scientist in the position of the savior. In the Early Modern period, ships embodied Christ while enacting imperial and colonizing missions, and for these vessels to succumb to degradation at the hands of demonic waters is an affront to the scientist, whose credo—even subconsciously—remains in keeping with the Christian theological emphases on salvation and the restoration of Edenic utopia. I see this approach as problematic in its paternalism and its insistence on intervention, both of which seem to be an effort to mimic the god that has risen to power in the West and, by extension, around the globe. Most deleterious is that the motives underlying these paternalistic interventions derive from the Abrahamic tradition that there is an ontological hierarchy with humans—made in imago dei—at the peak, lording over all other entities beneath them, down the scala naturae into devilish, microbial waters with their lowly fish and kelp and corals. From our collective view in the ecocidal Anthropocene, the violent severance and elevation of human culture from everything else on Earth has the consequence of extinction for everyone populating that supposed chain of being. As an alternative to the Abrahamic approach to the scientific study of wreckage, this book would like to offer a more anarchic variation—hauntography or something like it—that embraces others as kin and that regards with a sense of wonder the finitude of materiality.

Often located deep underwater, shipwrecks are esoteric. Their spectators, if they have any of the human kind, are the exclusive few possessing both the training and will to meet them in their own environment, which is fundamentally inhospitable to human presence. Even so, the internet is increasingly flooded with 3D digital reconstructions of shipwreck sites so that nearly anyone and everyone might participate in a ‘dry dive’. Photogrammetric models and VR experiences are labeled as democratizing, as they increase public awareness of and access to these sites/sights; they are even said to ‘bring history alive’. As explained in the previous chapters, though, most shipwreck sites are also graveyards, so when digital-exploration advocates claim to resurrect this history, what exactly is being promised and why? And while many virtual explorers seem satisfied with the prospect of immediate visual gratification, what might be lost by turning underwater graveyards into rapidly consumable commodities?

Introduction

On a Thursday in December 2018 in Leipzig, Germany, the selfproclaimed hacker and computer scientist Jan Krissler, alias ‘starbug’, and his colleague Julian showed the assembled crowd at the Chaos Communication Congress how they could fool a hand-vein biometric sensor with the use of a fake hand. The hand was made by capturing their palm vein patterns with a digital camera from which the infrared filter had been removed, mounting the patterns on a wooden hand and covering it with a layer of wax skin (Burt, 2019) (see Figure 9.1). Before this event, vein biometrics was considered one of the most secure biometric technologies. Vein patterns are located under the skin and were therefore considered more difficult if not impossible to fake.

Biometric technologies are digital technologies developed to register, recognize and distinguish individual bodies. Fingertips, faces, eyes, veins and other body parts enrolled for biometrics are considered unique in their dimensions, textures and patterns. These technologies are increasingly being discussed as their use proliferates across contexts. Fingerprint-, facial- and to some extent iris recognition are widely used in border control and consumer electronics (computers, smartphones, cars), for access to restricted sites, for identification of beneficiaries in health or social systems, in refugee camps, and increasingly for identification in banking (Bonneau et al 2018; Jacobsen, 2017, 2019; Grunenberg, 2020a). Biometric technologies are often talked about in terms of convenience and/or security by industry representatives. They are convenient because they make it unnecessary for individuals to remember passwords. As one biometric researcher argued, “You can forget your password, but you can't forget your body” (interview, Peter, professor of biometrics). Furthermore, according to researchers, they potentially enable more seamless interactions: doors that open as you approach, car seats that auto regulate to the particular body of a driver by, for example, registering a fingerprint. Biometric technologies are conceived of as security-enhancing devices because ideally they make it possible to distinguish between individuals who may legitimately cross a boundary, whether a national border or a more prosaic perimeter such as the entrance to an office, and those who may not.

In biometric research the notion of ‘spoofing’ appears to identify a particular form of impostering. The example of palm-vein spoofing mentioned at the opening of this chapter is a case in point.

Introducing the common cuckoo: ‘the quintessential cheat’?

Perched on a branch, a cuckoo hen watches in silence, waiting for a robin to leave her nest. Once the robin leaves to forage, the cuckoo approaches its nest, and crouches amid the robin's eggs. Within seconds the cuckoo lays its egg and flies off. In colour the cuckoo's egg approximates that of the robin. The robin soon returns to resume brooding her clutch. As far as we can tell, she does not react to the appearance of an additional egg now in her nest. On hatching, the robin raises the cuckoo nestling alongside her biological offspring. The cuckoo chick outcompetes some of the nestling robins. This results in the robin chicks’ death by starvation, and the ejection of their corpses from the nest. Upon sexual maturity, the surviving offspring – cuckoo and robins alike – go on to repeat this ecological cycle.

Ecologists describe this behaviour as brood parasitism. Cuckoos are a diverse family of 141 species ranging across all continents bar Antarctica. Not all cuckoo species are brood parasites. Those that are lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. Their eggs typically exhibit morphological features resembling those of the host, as we described with the robin. Seemingly none the wiser, the host birds rear the cuckoos’ offspring, often to the demise of their biological offspring. By mimicking host species egg morphology (and in some cases consuming the host bird's egg; Fromme, 2018) the cuckoo reproduces without engaging in parental care. In this way, cuckoo behaviour conjures the idea of imposture in the most intimate of contexts.

In the opening vignette, we tried to depict the cuckoo's actions in purely descriptive terms. But we found it took some considerable effort to avoid using terms like ‘sneak’, ‘invade’ or ‘cheat’ to refer to the events transpiring in the nest. The fact that purposive clinical detachment is difficult to maintain while writing about the nature of brood parasitism is noteworthy. As we discuss in this chapter, cuckoos’ brood-parasitic lifestyles are entangled with human conceptions of imposture. Indeed, human culture is littered with a variety of potent references to cuckoos’ nesting practices. Among these images, we are concerned with the notion of imposture that cuckoos’ brood-parasitic lifestyles evoke.

There are many current debates over the influence of the famous, the agency of fans, and the consequences of the emulation of prominent people. One of the most pervasive anxieties these address is that those who admire the famous, particularly young admirers, will imitate their ‘idols’. While Western commentators investigate the connection between ‘celebrity worship’ and cosmetic surgery (Maltby and Day, 2011), their Asian counterparts explore the relation of the ‘imitation of celebrity models and materialism’ among Chinese youth (Chan and Prendergast, 2008). Psychologists have developed an entire literature on the mimetic impulse in fandom, charting the descent from admiration to empathy to over-identification to obsession (Giles, 2000; McCutcheon et al, 2002, 2003). Their pathologization of this progress is echoed by the Christian motivational writer Kimberly Davidson on what she calls the ‘Celebrity Imitation Complex’:

But there is, Davidson goes on to claim, an alternative – not the abandonment of imitation, but its purposeful practice. Citing the 15th-century Latin devotional text Imitatio Christi, a collection of biblical and early Christian teachings by the Augustinian monk Thomas à Kempis, she maintains:

Paradoxically, in order for ‘Teens to Live Authentically in a Celebrity-Obsessed World’ (the subtitle of Davidson's polemic), they must imitate a very famous figure indeed.

Despite Davidson's self-contradiction, her concerns about the imitation of prominent people reflect pervasive worries about people ‘passing’ into social spheres or occupations barred to them, or presenting themselves as materially or morally superior to their actual condition, convincing others and even themselves that they are different than they are.

Hesitation

The song sounded familiar. I had doubtless heard it before. Its lyrics were fervently performed by its interpreters while standing inside a moving bus. This version of Juan Gianitti's El Camino del Dolor – the Path of Pain – was carefully attended to by most of the passengers in the bus. After the song finished, the younger member of the duo saluted the audience and went to every seat to collect coins and food. This was not the first time they had done this, as I could deduce from their skill in managing the movements of the bus while successfully playing the guitar and singing. I was returning from Altos de Cazucà, a slum in a town called Soacha located in the south-west of Bogotà where people moving into the city usually settle after escaping from the still ongoing situation of violence in Colombia. When the duo came off the bus, I decided to join them and initiate a conversation. This impulsive and intuitive act resulted in a revealing encounter with Luis and his son who generously shared their story after I explained my interest in their performance and experiences (Figure 13.1).

When asked about their lives before coming to the city, Luis seemed to repeat the lyrics of the song they had just performed in the bus. Like the song's author, they too had once owned a farm. They lived there until 2008, when an armed group that occupied the region assaulted and assassinated Luis’ wife and daughter before expelling him and his son from their land. “Even if it was safer to go back, I would not do it”, were the words he used to describe their reluctance to revisit a place full of painful memories – their own Camino del Dolor. Luis told me how he moved among different towns trying to find a job and a place to stay with his son. They both claimed to be earning enough money to survive in the city through their performances on buses.

Something drew my attention while talking. Luis constantly asked his son to hand him things or inquired what time it was. I initially interpreted this as their merely being in a hurry. A powerful revelation in Luis’ story, however, suggested more was going on. Luis had a visual impairment and played the guitar by heart.