World’s oldest submerged town starts to give up its secrets - October 19, 2009
Posted on behalf of Kerri Smith
The first findings from an ancient Greek town that was swallowed by the sea around 3,000 years ago have come to light.
A joint Greek and British team of archaeologists and divers have been surveying the submerged town of Pavlopetri, just off the coast of southern Greece, and have turned up shards of pottery and other remains dating from as long ago as 3500 BC – which dates the town to the Bronze Age, and makes it over 1000 years older than the team previously thought.
“We got late Neolithic pottery, which dates to about 3500 BC, which is earlier than anything else that was found on the site before,” says Jon Henderson of the University of Nottingham, one of the underwater archaeologists working on the project. “And we’ve got a full sequence [of remains] up until about 1000BC. So it looks like it was occupied for a very long period of time.”
The submerged site was also bigger than it was when originally discovered and mapped by hand in the 1960s. “The sand has moved since the 60s,” says Henderson. “There’s 9000 m2 of new buildings.” The site is now thought to cover an area of around 30,000 m2.
Nature reported on the expedition when it began in May this year.
Since then the team, led by Henderson and his team at Nottingham and a Greek team under the direction of Elias Spondylis from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, have digitally mapped much of the site and lifted some remains from the surface. As the project continues they hope to map the site in more detail and start to excavate some of the buildings.
Image: Jon Henderson
