Underwater town breaks antiquity record

A settlement that long ago sank into the Mediterranean Sea has been identified as the world's oldest underwater town. Pavlopetri, off the southern coast of the Pelopennese in Greece, has been dated to around 3000 BC.

Although Pavlopetri was found in 1967, the Greek government has just announced that 5000-year-old pottery fragments have been recovered from the town, forcing a rethink of when it was first occupied.

Moreover, the government has also revealed that a further 9000 square metres of buildings, streets, and graves – plus what looks like a large ceremonial building called a megaron – have been discovered. This suggests that Pavlopetri may have been an important trading port, and provides new clues about how Neolithic people lived.

"You can find scattered huts or Palaeolithic caves [on the sea bed] which are much older, but not towns with streets, and rows of houses sharing common walls," says Nic Flemming of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, who first discovered Pavlopetri in the 1960s and dated it to around 1500 BC.

"What we've got here is something that's 2000 or even 3000 years older than most of the submerged cities that have been studied. And its uniqueness is not just its age, but the fact that it was used as a port."
Boom town

Although settlements of similar age have been found on land, no such towns have been found on the coast. "This was effectively a massive town, with a hinterland of scattered farms in the hills, plus copper mines," says Flemming.

"It was a crossroads for seafaring, a critical transport point between the mainland and Crete, and a rich agricultural district. In terms of understanding what was happening at that time, it's extremely exciting."

The new-found buildings and structures were discovered using sector-scanning sonar, a technique originally developed for the oil and gas industry, but recently turned to underwater archaeology: for example, it was used to identify an ancient stone circle on the bottom of Lake Michigan.
More to come

Moreover, because the site is submerged, organic material such as wood or food – long since disappeared from towns from the same period that are still above the waves – may also have been preserved. "Once we start excavating this site we should learn a lot about what it was like to live in a Bronze Age town," says Jon Henderson of the University of Nottingham, UK, who co-directed the underwater survey. (Henderson talks about the work further in videos on the University of Nottingham website.)

Pavlopetri is thought to have sunk as a result of the frequent earthquakes that afflict the region.

"It's a rare find, and it is significant because, as a submerged site, it was never reoccupied and therefore represents a frozen moment of the past," adds Elias Spondylis of the Greek culture ministry.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18023-underwater-town-breaks-antiquity-record.html