This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.
Depending what Subreddits you subscribe to you may already have seen this, but its been in the news that a new expedition to the Antikythera wreck is being planned.
Most of the news focus has been on the use of a hard shell diving suit to extend bottom times there. This will be important because the wreck is in deep water where normal bottom times are minimal.
The wreck was one of the first examples of then modern diving equipment being used to recover artifacts for museums instead of military salvage. The initial work was done around 1900 with surface supplied canvas dive suits. Though there was no methodology to speak of, the finds were legendary including the Antikythera Mechanisim and Roman copies of Greek statuary.
The initial recovery was quite extensive so I am not sure what will be found but I look forward to hearing more in the future.
You can read about the first expedition in detail in Throckmorton's Shipwrecks and Archaeology; the Unharvested Sea
I just ordered No Requiem for the Space Age: The Apollo Moon Landings in American Culture by Matthew Tribbe. From the publisher's description: "Rather than studying the space program itself, he focuses more on the peculiarities of an American society and culture that sent men to the moon semiannually over the 1968-72 period, and then stopped."
The interesting thing is that this seems like the most fundamental of research questions, but as evidenced by this book being published this year, I don't think it's ever been fully addressed. Most secondary space histories have a 'cultural component', or the space program is a section in other cultural histories of technology (I'm thinking like David Nye American Technological Sublime) I see a number of questions here that get at this- how did people feel about this or that aspect of the space program, and they usually go mostly unanswered. Though space historians have the benefit of extensive internal documentation from NASA and related agencies and companies, the kinds of sources that would be needed to give answers to those kinds of questions are really scattered. I can think of where I would look in primary documents and media sources, but I usually don't have anything on my shelf that is a go-to. I certainly don't have an exclusively cultural history of the space program in this vein. I'm looking forward to this for that reason, but I'm also eyeing it with that special kind of fear- this is my research area.