Sunday, October 18, 2009

"A Frozen Moment of the Past"


...Says Mr. Elias Spondylis from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture in Greece about Pavlopetri, the new ancient Greek town that has been found under water. Pavlopetri was actually found 5 years ago off the southern Laconia coast of Greece, but the Greek government just made the findings public. Pavplopetri was a maritime settlement where the people traded locally and long distance. This Mycenean town allows a look into the workings of Mycenean society. The archeologists working on it have almost the whole town plan which includes the main streets, religious buildings, domestic buildings, courtyards and tombs. They've also found what could be a megaron - a giant town hall - which is an extremely important discovery in terms of Mycenean society. They also found cermaics that dated back to the "Final Neolithic" which suggests that this town was occupied around 5,000 years ago - around 1,200 years earlier than they had originally thought. The town was occupied during the bronze age (from around 2800 BC to 1100 BC). The amazing thing about this whole town being underwater is that no one has ever had the chance to re-occupy it, so everything has been left exactly the way it was. The research on this site is being carried out by the Pavlopetri Underwater Archaeology Project and they plan to "establish exactly when the site was occupied, what it was used for and through a systematic study of the geomorphology of the area, how the town became submerged". They are going to carry on their research of Pavlopetri and there will be four more fieldwork sessions before they publish their research in full in 2014.

Interesting video (yes its long)

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