Marine Archaeology News Archive

Meanwhile, on May 28 2002 National Geographic News reported on the many recent discoveries underwater on the coastal shelves around the world. We could not improve on their introduction, which led with:

August 24 2000 – It was reported in The Guardian newspaper that an Italian team of scientists have discovered the remains of a temple at the site of a ‘mythical city’. Alex Bellos, their South America correspondent, filed a story that told of the recent discovery of the ruins of a huge temple underwater in Lake Titicaca in the Andes between Bolivia and Peru.

Archaeologists from an international expedition team, Atahuallpa 2000, had made more than 200 dives in the lake, which at 3,800 metres above sea-level is the world’s highest navigable lake. Expedition leader, Lorenzo Epis, told Bellos:

Ceramic artifacts were also found on the floor of Lake Titicaca, which has long been the subject of legends about a ‘lost underwater city’, but Bellos reported that little research had been done before because of the difficulties of diving at high altitudes.

September 13 2000 – BBC News Online has reported that scientists have uncovered ancient ruins under the Black Sea which indicate that people lived in the area before a cataclysmic flood inundated their homeland.

Some scientists have linked the 7,000-year-old event, thought to have been caused by waters bursting through from the Mediterranean Sea, to the Biblical story of Noah. Dr Robert Ballard told the BBC that:

adding this was far more significant a find than his discovery of the Titanic way back in 1985.

One of the many ‘sidescan sonar’ images of part of the megalithic complex discovered by ADC. Using a growing array of sophisticated underwater equipment, which includes the ROV, such images are facinating archæologists and geologists around the world. It has been suggested that what they have discovered in the Yucatan Channel could be the buildings and monuments of an early, unknown American civilization, which sank beneath the waves during some ancient cataclysm.

ADC is owned and run by Ocean Engineer, Paulina Zelitsky, and her husband, and partner, Dr Paul Weinzweig. In June 2002 The Morien Institute contacted Dr Weinzweig in Cuba, and he kindly agreed to answer some of our questions in an Exclusive Interview between June 3rd – 12th 2002.

As ADC‘s investigations progress, it will be interesting to see if any of the roadways, or the axis orientation of any of the major structures, points in the direction of the ‘Old North Pole’, which during the last Ice Age was said to have been at 60° North, 73° West, in the Hudson’s Bay area

…

The controversy that has erupted in archæological circles around the world since the discovery of an enigmatic

structure, described by some as a huge ‘pyramid-like structure’, at Iseki Point, in abour 300ft. of water just off the coast of the southernmost Japanese island of Yonaguni-Jima, some 15 years ago, looks set to get even hotter as news emerges that the so-called ‘Yonaguni Monument’ is just one of a number of underwater megalithic structures in a ‘complex’ which stretches for many hundreds of miles northeast of Taiwan into the East China Sea.

As the sea-levels rose at the end of the last Ice Age, the dry land that was once between the Chinese mainland and Japan was inundated, and only in the last few years has the attention of marine scientists been drawn to the existence of ‘walls’, ‘stepped-pyramid-like structures’, and some very ‘unusual artifacts’ that have been found underwater between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland.

This area must be one of the most promising for marine archæology as ever more sophisticated underwater detection technologies, once the sole preserve of the world’s naval forces, becomes available to research scientists.

Saturday, January 19, 2002, BBC News Online told of a ‘lost city’ that had recently been discovered in about 120 feet of underwater in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay) off the western coast of Gujarat, in India. It was found completely by chance by marine scientists from the Indian National Institute of Ocean Technology, (NIOT), who were conducting a water pollution survey of the area. Oceanographers from NIOT told the BBC that they had discovered archæological remains which could be over 9,000 years old.

On their website BBC Online reported that “Using sidescan sonar which sends a beam of sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120 feet.”

An assortment of debris was recovered from the site area, including pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculptures and also human bones and teeth, some of which have been carbon 14 dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old.

This amazing discovery is bound to radically change accepted ideas of Indian prehistory as: “The city is believed to be even older than the ancient Harappan civilisation, which dates back around 4,000 years”

Indian marine archæologists have, as well as side-scan sonar, also used a technique called “sub-bottom profiling” to show that the remains of the many buildings of this vast city, which is five miles long and two miles wide, and said to predate the oldest known archæological remains on the Indian subcontinent by more than 5,000 years, stand on enormous foundations.

One of the resulting images is immediately above, and is testimony to the value that former naval forces detection technologies can be when applied to underwater archæological research.

That there will inevitably be much evidence of Ice Age civilisation discovered on the vast tracts of land submerged after the end of the last Ice Age is something that The Morien Institute researcher, John Michael, has been saying for many years, and it hadn’t gone unnoticed that the BBC’s January 2002 story was not first time that BBC Online has referred to the discovery of these incredible archæological remains in this eastern part of the Arabian Sea.

On Tuesday, May 22nd, 2001, BBC News Online had reported the initial discovery of what was then only thought to be structures that ” … resemble archæological sites belonging to the Harappan civilisation, dating back more than 4,000 years.”, though it is now suspected that they are much larger than originally thought, and much earlier still …