5,000-year-old Underwater City Starts Yielding Secrets

Underwater City Starts Yielding SecretsDivers Find Pottery, Streets, Courtyards, Tombs and Buildings
AOL News

(Oct. 22) -- Scientists have known for 40 years that a 5,000-year-old city lay obscured by water off southern Greece. But divers haven't had a chance to study the ruins until now.
A team from the University of Nottingham in England is working with the Greek government in exploring the site. So far, archaeologists and geologists have learned that Pavlopetri is about 1,000 years older than they first thought, according to the BBC.

The Bronze Age site is believed to have been submerged since 1000 B.C.
In an interview in the Guardian, Jon Henderson, associate professor of underwater archaeology at Nottingham, explained the significance of the site.
"It has remains dating from 2800 to 1200 B.C., long before the glory days of classical Greece," he said. "There are older sunken sites in the world but none can be considered to be planned towns such as this, which is why it is unique."
The city may have inspired the myth of the lost city of Atlantis, the Guardian said.
The divers have found a wealth of material on the sea floor, including pottery shards, streets, courtyards, tombs and 97,000 square feet of buildings, the Guardian reported. "But what really took us by surprise was the discovery of a possible megaron, a monumental structure with a large rectangular hall, which also suggests that the town had been used by an elite, and automatically raised the status of the settlement," Henderson said.
The site was discovered in 1967 by Nicholas Flemming, a marine scientist at the University of Southampton, the BBC said. He is a part of the new expedition team, which plans to study the city for five years and publish its research in 2014, the BBC said.
Greece's underwater antiquities department is co-directing the study. The site "is significant because as a submerged site it was never reoccupied," Elias Spondylis, an official with the agency, said in an interview with the Guardian. "As such it represents a frozen moment of the past."
For more on the team's discoveries, go to the BBC and the Guardian.
Below are two videos on the research project from the University of Nottingham. The second one has Flemming's account of his discovery of the city.






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