Digging Underwater
The ancient Greeks saw both land and sea as gods and what you and I see as erosion, they viewed in terms of conflict between the gods. Sea almost cut through the whole of Greece but Earth put up a spirited resistance and managed to stop Sea at the Isthmus of Corinth. However Earth wasn't quite so successful at the Bosphorus, where Sea succeeded in eating a channel right through from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. As an explanation for the geological features of the ancient world, it lacked a certain predictive power, no matter how picturesque it might be.
Sometimes, of course, Sea could get really nasty and swallow up a town or even a whole island in a single gulp and Pliny, in his Natural HIstory, mentions several such disasters. Unfortunately he does not mention Pavlopetri, a town which was swallowed by the sea back in the Late Helladic Period (1400-1060 BC) and not seen again until Dr Nicholas Flemming of the University of Cambridge discovered it in 1967.
The following year a team from Cambridge returned to the site, which lies just off a popular bathing beach in 12-16 feet of water, and conducted a site survey and mapping using scuba gear and measuring tapes. They identified the remains of buildings, courtyards, streets, chamber tombs and 37 cist graves. A little sifting through the mud on the site turned up pottery, figurines, obsidian flakes and other small finds which could be dated form the Early Helladic right through to the Late Helladic. from 2800 BC to 1060 BC.
Unfortunately the remains are in a gently curving bay with a sandy beach which in ancient times formed an ideal location where ships could be dragged up on the sand and provided the sheltered harbour that formed the foundation for the prosperity of the Pavlopetri merchants. Today the sandy beach is equally popular with tourists who find an added attraction in the possibility of snorkling offshore and viewing the ruins.
If that was all they did, no one would mind, but as we always find on our tours, there are people who have lost the ability to see with their eyes and have to see with their hands - their eyes are keen enough to pick out a sixpence on the other side of a broad highway, but when it comes to some fragile 3,000 year old painting nothing will suffice but that they run their sweaty fingers all over it. Such people are not content to drift over Pavlopetri in the sun-warm waters, but have to dive down and stand on the crumbling walls, dislodging the stones as they try to keep their balance.
Mind you, the Greeks are by no means innocent in the matter either. Services provided to the tourists include boat rides, water skiing and bit parachutes towed behind powerful speed boats. When business is slack the Greeks drop their anchors overboard and then, when a tourist hoves in sight, they haul their anchors up again, heedless of the fact that they are caught in 3,500 year old walls, which come tumbling down as the anchor flukes jerk free.
In view of the continual degradation of the site, Dr Jon Henderson from the Underwater Archaeology Research Centre of the University of Nottingham, has obtained permission from the Greek authorities to carry out a new survey of the ruins. (Note that no special permission is required to damage or destroy the site, but if you want to preserve it the Greeks make you jump through hoops.) Henderson and his team will be the first archaeologists to obtain access to the site in 40 years.
Over the next four years Henderson and his team will be scanning the site using equipment developed for the military and the offshore oil drilling companies. The acoustic scanner can rapidly produce photo-realistic, 3D digital pictures of the seabed with an accuracy of less than a millimetre. With the data generated by the scanner, the team will then be able to recreate a digital 3D map of the city which can be made available to anyone wanting to study it - and there will be no need to fight the Greek bureaucrats for permission!
Dr Henderson says, "A fundamental aim of the project is to raise awareness of the importance of the site and ensure that it is ethically managed and presented to the public in a way which is sustainable and of benefit to both the development of tourism and the local community.”
Another aim of the project is to study the geology of southern Laconia to discover why the city disappeared under the sea, whether it was in an earthquake, long-term earth movements or changes in sea level which brought about the end of Pavlopetri.
Whether the project leads in the long term to excavation of the site remains to be seen, but the archaeologists hope that it will reveal new information about trade and shipping in this important period of Greek history. The only problem is that despite generous funding from the University of Nottingham, the British School of Archaeology in Athens and the Institute of Aegean Pre-history, Dr Henderson is £10,000 short of the amount he estimates will be required for the four years of work. If you have recently won the lottery, you might like to consider this project for your generosity.
Early Helladic The more common name for this period is "Bronze Age", but depending on the place of origin archaeologists call this Helladic, Cycladic or Minoan. On the mainland it is known as the Mycenaean period. Return
© Kendall K. Down 2009
