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I've actually had this conversation before with an archeologist with some naval archeology experience.

Shipwreck hunting is ridiculously expensive. The resources required to exhaustively explore 100 sqm of space is probably 1000x of the resources required to do it on land. There aren't any easy shortcuts: radar doesn't work underwater, sonar does but is extremely low resolution, lidar works pretty well but only if the water is very shallow and clear, underwater drones have extremely limited mobility and communication capability. A lot of funding in archeology tends to go to easier or higher probability wins, which has mostly been aerial lidar in heavy vegetation areas for the past 10-15 years.

The best shipwreck hunters rely almost entirely on probabilistic models for where they might find shipwrecks, and the most useful probabilistic models have all developed in the last 30-40 years. In fact, some of the best probabilistic models like Bayesian Search Theory actually originated as a formalization of heuristics that were already used in treasure/shipwreck hunting.

In that respect, I would argue that this find is actually the result of recent advances in probabilistic modeling (along with other advances in data engineering with respect to extremely messy historical data sources) that have just barely gotten accurate enough to start getting the funding it needs to do the harder work of actually working on the sea floor.

While I can't speak for these wrecks specifically, archeology as a field is chronically underfunded. They have to pick and choose their battles.

grew up around there, honestly, just not much going on other than bored rich folk and poor folk trying to make a living.

There are VASTLY more interesting archeological sites than the world has resources to investigate!

> 800 years (that's more than European living in America now) muslim Spanish empire with its knowledge center in Toledo

The Muslim dominion of the Iberian Peninsula did not last 800 years. The Muslim invasion started in 711 CE, and by 1085 Toledo has fallen back to the Christian kingdom of León. Granada would eventually be conquered in 1492, but most of the old Visigothic Kingdom was already in the hands of the Christians.

> This center was later captured in 11th century CE, and this event essentially started the Western Renaissance movement in Europe.

Islamic contribution within the context of European history should be both acknowledged and recognized as being autoctonous, but attributing to it things that well attested through other pathways works against it and reinforces myths historians are toiling to get rid of.

The Renaissance as we know it was kickstarted by the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 by the French and Italians, that's well documented and broadly agreed on by historians. All of this happened on the foundations laid down from the 11th c. onwards as the post-Carolingian world was stabilized.

It's not like Tariq ibn Ziyad invented the concept of intentionally making a retreat impossible in order to compel soldiers to fight. There are proverbs about this kind of thing that predate him by centuries: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%A0%B4%E9%87%9C%E6%B2%89%E... It's probably a popular story to tell because it raises the stakes and provides for dramatic tension: either the battle is won or the army will be annihilated. But I suspect there've been quite a few unlucky commanders who tried this, got annihilated, and never had their heroism praised in history books.

The Guardian is in the UK, but I've seen dialogs like that even on some german sites, so i guess it's legal.

> is it legal for websites to ask me to either accept tracking or pay

It's complicated and actively being ruled on in different ways by different countries.

It is a gray zone. Some national regulatory agencies has said ”pay or consent” is compatible with GDPR and some have said it is not. It hasn’t yet been tested by the EU court.

You can't usually force a business to do business with you (i.e. serve you content, for free) even in the EU

IANAL but the legal argument seems pretty simple to me based on that concept, so I wonder if that's why it hasn't gone to court yet?

Do we as users even want it to? Imagine if the organisations won...