Page 113 - Manual for Activities directed at the Underwater Cultural Heritage

All these aspects greatly influence the project objective, methodology and techniques and need to be taken into account during their design. Therefore, no action should be taken without the prior identification and validation of specific goals appropriate to the site and a methodology that matches those goals and the technical challenges involved.
Project objectives
The ‘objectives’ describe the purpose of a project or major research questions that it will address. These could include questions about:
• What the site could reveal about advances in technology of a par- ticular society - such as in ship-buil- ding, mining, fishing or other tech- nologies;
• How information from one site could compare with information from another site (underwater or on land or from recorded history);
• How trade was conducted by the people associated with the site;
• What the site could reveal about migration, exploration, social advances or the disappearance of a cultural group, the time in history when the site was formed, used or abandoned;
• Other technological achievements or cultural developments.
Research is not the only possible objective of a project. For a management intervention there can be a range of reasons, for example, to stabilize the site or to facilitate access because the site is considered a tourist attraction for recreational divers.
Without exception, the objectives should fit into a more encompassing vision for research or conservation that is realized through a range of projects. Such a vision can have many open ends, but the design of a single project should not be open-ended.
 © Jon Henderson. Divers measuring a cist grave at Pavlopetri site, Greece. Archaeologists surveying Pavlopetri, which is supposed to be the world's oldest submerged town, have found ceramics dating back to the Final Neolithic.Their discovery suggests that Pavlopetri was occupied some 5,000 years ago.The Pavlopetri site is unique in that it has almost the complete town plan, the main streets and domestic buildings, courtyards, rock-cut tombs and what appear to be religious buildings, clearly visible on the seabed.
The Pavlopetri Underwater Archaeology Project aims to establish exactly when the site was occupied, what it was used for and through a systematic study of the geomorphology of the area, how the town became submerged. 
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Objective, methodology and techniques