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?

Astronomers depend on light for their understanding of the cosmos beyond the confines of the Solar System. Many of the most exciting discoveries over the last couple of decades were made possible by new generations of cameras and telescopes, both on the ground and in space. The resulting observations captured the imagination not just of the scientists but also of the general public. Dr Crawford will discuss the new facilities anticipated coming online over the next ten years or so – how they’ll not only change our view of the Universe, but also alter the way we do Astronomy.

Can we trust the judgement of machines that see? Computer vision is being entrusted with ever more critical tasks: from access control by face recognition, to diagnosis of disease from medical scans and hand-eye coordination for surgical and nuclear decommissioning robots, and now to taking control of motor vehicles.

Can we 'see' photons, black holes, curved spacetime, quantum jumps, the expansion of the universe, or quanta of space? Physics challenges appearances, showing convincingly that our everyday vision of reality is limited, approximate and badly incomplete. Established theories such as quantum theory and general relativity and investigations like loop quantum gravity have a reputation of obscurity. Many suggest that science is forcing us into a counterintuitive and purely mathematical understanding of reality. I disagree. I think that there is a visionary core at the root of the best science. Where 'visionary' truly means formed by visual images. Our mind, even when dealing with abstract and difficult notions, relies on images, metaphors and, ultimately, vision. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, science is not just about making predictions: it is about understanding, and, for this, developing new eyes to see. I shall illustrate this point with some concrete cases, including the birth of quantum theory in Einstein’s intuition, curved spacetimes and quanta of space.

Sophie Hackford explores the idea that the way that computers see the world is becoming our dominant reality. The idea that a physical object, and its data ‘exhaust’, are in constant dialogue with each other. As machine autonomy creeps into our everyday lives, we are creating a physical internet, where people, objects, vehicles move as seamlessly in the real world as data moves around the internet. Digital bots or ‘agents’ might represent us in interactions with our banks, friends, colleagues. Autonomous companies might soon be big players in the economy. Hackford will explore a world where human and machine ‘vision’ will collaborate, compete and even merge together.