Theos-Talk Archives (February 2002 Message tt00045)

(From: http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=1176)
See also BBC News link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1768000/17681
09.stm

"The whole model of the origins of civilization with which 
archaeologists have 
been working will have to be remade from scratch..."
Another Submerged City
21-Jan-2002

The remains of a huge underwater city off the western coast of India 
may force 
historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of 
ancient 
human history. It's believed that the area was submerged when ice 
caps melted 
at the end
of the last ice age, 9-10,000 years ago.

Marine scientists say archaeological remains disco
vered 120 feet underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast 
of India 
could be over 9,000 years old. The vast city - which is five miles 
long and 
two miles wide - is believed to predate the oldest known remains in 
the 
subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.

The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from 
India's 
National Institute of Ocean Technology who were conducting a survey 
of 
pollution. Using sidescan sonar - which sends a beam of sound waves 
down to 
the bottom of the oce
an - they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120 
feet. 
Debris recovered from the site - including construction material, 
pottery, 
sections of walls, beads, sculpture and human bones and teeth - has 
been 
carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old.

However, archaeologist Justin Morris from the British Museum says 
more work 
will need to be done before the site can be said to belong to a 9,000 
year old 
civilization, since there can be errors in carbon dating. "Culturally 
speaking,
in that part of the world there were no civilizations prior to about 
2,500 
BC. What's happening before then mainly consisted of small, village 
settlements," he says.

Strong tides make investigations in the Cambay difficult. Marine 
scientists 
led by the Madras-based National Institute of Ocean Technology are 
solving 
this problem by taking acoustic images off the sea-bed and using 
dredging 
equipment to extract artifacts.

The Indian Minister for Ocean Technology, Murli Manohar Joshi, says 
the images 
i
ndicate symmetrical man-made structures and also a paleo-river, with 
banks 
containing artifacts, such as pottery. Carbon dating on a block of 
wood 
brought up from the depths suggests it dates back to 7,595 BC. "We 
have to 
find out what happened then ... where and how this civilisation 
vanished," he 
says.

The city is believed to be even older than the ancient Harappan 
civilisation, 
which dates back around 4,000 years and is the oldest on the 
subcontinent. 
Although Palaeolithic sites dating back around 20
,000 years have been found on the coast of India's western state of 
Gujarat 
before, this is the first time that man-made structures as old as 
9,500 years 
have been found deep beneath the ocean surface.

Marine archaeologists have used a technique known as sub- bottom 
profiling to 
show that the buildings were built on enormous foundations. Graham 
Hancock, 
author of "Fingerprints of the Gods," says, "The [oceanographers] 
found that 
they were dealing with two large blocks of apparently man made 
structures.
Cities on this scale are not known in the archaeological record until 
roughly 
4,500 years ago when the first big cities begin to appear in 
Mesopotamia. 
Nothing else on the scale of the underwater cities of Cambay is 
known. The 
first cities of the historical period are as far away from these 
cities as we 
are today from the pyramids of Egypt."

Hancock feels this discovery could have a major influence on our view 
of the 
ancient world. "There's a huge chronological problem in this 
discovery. It 
means that t
he whole model of the origins of civilization with which 
archaeologists have 
been working will have to be remade from scratch," he says.