Ancient recoveries

Brown questions the picture we get from the phrase “crash retrieval.” He thinks some recoveries could be archaeological, and says his personal view is that this might even be more common than actual crashes. He also makes clear that he had no direct access to the reverse-engineering program. So this is a possibility he's discussing, not a dig he is describing from firsthand experience.

That's a much more interesting distinction than it first sounds. A crash story sends you looking for the event: what failed, who saw it, who got there first? An archaeological recovery raises another problem entirely. The day someone found the object might tell us very little about when it arrived. We could be arguing about a modern recovery operation while the important part of the story happened long before it.

The exchange brings up an object beneath substantial layers of ocean-floor sediment. That's where I'd want everyone to slow down before getting too excited about the machinery. I'd want to know what the surrounding layers actually tell us, whether they've been disturbed, and how the object fits into them. “Buried” is not a date. But if its age and setting could be established, that context might be as valuable as whatever we'd dragged out of the seabed.

I don't think “we recovered something” should quietly settle how it got there. Give us the circumstances of the recovery; otherwise we might spend years explaining a crash that wasn't a crash at all. If Brown is right that ancient finds could outnumber crashes, that would be a pretty consequential misunderstanding to build into the name.