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Ancient Cities Lost to the SeasExplore more photos from the story |
Beneath the slate-gray surface of the North Sea, about a half-mile off England’s east coast, lies the underwater town of Dunwich. Crabs and lobsters skitter along the streets where some 3,000 people walked during the town’s heyday in the Middle Ages. Fish dart through the sea sponge-ridden ruins of its churches, now partially buried in the seabed some 30 feet down.
Erosion—caused by the North Sea’s relentless pounding of England’s east coast—had all but consumed Dunwich (pronounced DUN-ich) by 1750. And the sea’s silty, cold waters made visibility almost nonexistent for the intrepid few who wanted to explore the medieval ruins.
Until now. Thanks to advances in acoustic technology, a group of divers and a geomorphologist are surveying the sunken town this summer using multibeam and sidescan sonars that can detect objects on the seafloor. During a survey last year, the group mapped two churches and found evidence of a third.
“This is absolutely opening the seas up,” said David Sear, the Dunwich project’s geomorphologist who teaches at the University of Southampton. And, he added, the North Sea has plenty to reveal; in addition to Dunwich, Sear would like to use the undersea technology to explore the submerged towns of Old Kilnsea and Eccles that lie farther north.
The English sunken sites join a list of others that span the globe. According to UNESCO, submerged settlements have been found in Egypt, India, Jamaica, Argentina, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and the Black Sea.
“Under the sea is probably the world’s biggest museum,” said James P. Delgado, president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology based in Texas. “There’s not a lot of work going on in this area right now, however. The issues are time, money, interest, and research. Just to do a single shipwreck can take years.... Underwater archaeology costs 10 times more to dig.”
In addition to these issues, Delgado noted a strong push toward conservation pervading the world of nautical archaeology. People aren’t jumping into the water unless a site is in danger or stands to advance research.
For Sear, surveying Dunwich answers a question people in the region have asked for years: Is anything left?
Comments
Amazing, one day my children's children will take scenic tours over New York. "Is it not a wonderful ever changing world in which wen live in",(Paul McCartney.
Posted by Malachi on August 4,2009 | 07:38AM
This article is so confusing. Why is the city 30 feet under the water. The article says erosion took the city away but then it says churches have been found 30 feet under the water. If they were eroded away why would they still be intact??? Wouldn't there just be pieces scattered here and there instead of intact structures. Or has the ocean risen over 30 feet since before 1750. Are Alexandria and the other cities mentioned also about 30 feet deep. It sounds like it since you can see one city from a glass bottomed boat and can put an undersea museum on another. Did separate earthquakes sink all of these cities and sink them all to a similar depth?? INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW.
Posted by wb on August 4,2009 | 02:17PM
If Dunwich was inundated by erosion, a slow process, how come the structures weren't removed to higher ground? I'm thinking of Nauset light on Cape Cod. If you have the technology to built a structure, it would seem you could move it as well.
Posted by Jim Lacey on August 6,2009 | 08:27AM
In response to wb confusion.
The Churches are indeed in ruins on the sea floor having collapsed down the cliff like the one shown in the photo. However, the earlier parts of the town close to the harbour did not go over a cliff as the sea eroded the coastline but were probably overwhelmed in storm surges. Hence their foundations may remain in-situ though with their walls in ruins around them. Hope this helps clarify the situation.
Posted by David Sear on August 6,2009 | 12:05PM
I am another inquiring mind that wants to know also. It would be good to know really what happened there and how to prevent it from occurring again.
SH
Posted by Sharon Henson on August 6,2009 | 03:30PM
You might want to consider Dwarka to be added to this list. Here's a link from the Archaeological Survey of India with some details of the explorations done:
http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/may102004/1256.pdf
Posted by atul on August 6,2009 | 08:48PM
I agree - this was a tantalizing article. As I read the article I was having a hard time featuring how this could have happened. Even the photo gave no clues. I would be interested to learn more about this - and the other cities.
Posted by Brenda on August 7,2009 | 06:01AM
To answer your question Jim, They may not have had the right technology, or money to move an entire town for the sake of some museum artifacts. Besides, we're learning, just as much about it now as we would if they tried to move it.
Posted by Jacob on August 7,2009 | 05:24PM
The coastline was eroded. The stone buildings wouldn't have washed away; they're too heavy. As the sand and dirt washed away, the buildings sank slowly under the water. This happened centuries ago, so the people probably just moved inland and finally just moved far enough away to start a new city -- or just become part of another community.
It's different now. Think of Venice. Now there are all kinds of efforts to preserve it. If it had sunk as much as it has a thousand years ago, it would have been abandoned, decay would have taken over, and now it would just be a curiosity.
Posted by David DelGreco on August 8,2009 | 09:40AM
It wasn't that hard to find the answers. The loss of this town happened over a period of a few hundred years in incremental stages. And in the Middle Ages, I would think that they had enough on their plates just getting through day to day life without contemplating moving the buildings inland. Note this segment from the wikipedia entry which says that the clifftop ruins that are still visible in the present day were once a MILE inland. That's rather a LOT of coastal movement.
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In 1286 a large storm swept much of the town into the sea and the River Dunwich was partly silted up. Residents fought to save the harbour but this too was destroyed by an equally fierce storm in 1328, which also swept away the entire village of Newton, a few miles up the coast. Another large storm in 1347 swept some 400 houses into the sea. A quarter of the city had been lost and the remainder of Dunwich was lost to the sea over a period of two to three hundred years through a form of coastal erosion known as long-shore drift. Buildings that sit on the present day cliffs were once a mile inland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunwich
Posted by mm on August 9,2009 | 10:10AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunwich
The Domesday Book of 1086 describes it as possessing three churches. The historian and diver Stuart Bacon, who has made several visits to the seabed in a bid to find the remains of the old town, has found evidence that it may have possessed up to 18 churches and chapels at the height of its fortune during the 12th and 13th centuries.
In 1286 a large storm swept much of the town into the sea and the River Dunwich was partly silted up. Residents fought to save the harbour but this too was destroyed by an equally fierce storm in 1328, which also swept away the entire village of Newton, a few miles up the coast. Another large storm in 1347 swept some 400 houses into the sea. A quarter of the city had been lost and the remainder of Dunwich was lost to the sea over a period of two to three hundred years through a form of coastal erosion known as long-shore drift. Buildings that sit on the present day cliffs were once a MILE INLAND.
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That should answer the why-didn't-they-move-it question.
Posted by mm on August 9,2009 | 10:16AM
I understand the fascination with cities like Dunwich because I am very intrigued by this subject. At the same time, I do not believe archeologists and oceanographers go far enough in their research on such sites as Dunwich. Why not take a look at the possibilities of cities existing along ancient coast lines PRIOR to the thawing of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age? By most accounts, ocean levels were anywhere from 400 to 500 feet lower than they are today. This means if a city existed along the coastline of that time period, it would now be 400 to 500 feet under water and almost impossible to excavate. Could this explain the lingering myth of Atlantis? Given the rate at which the thaw took place, water would have inundated any human settlement of that time period in very short order. It may have taken a few years for the cities to be swamped, but the rise in sea level would have been unstoppable and the submergence of the cities inevitable. Not enough attention is being paid to this very important and very un-researched subject, which has the potential of changing our most fundamental views of ancient history.
Posted by Martin on August 10,2009 | 10:57AM
Article immensely intriguing: our family lost a large home on a peninsula Bayocean northwest Oregon just after "Pearl Harbor". US Army Corps Engineers had built a jetty to divert ocean current from silting navigable Tillamook Bay. Consequently, violent winter current thrust against our peninsula's shoreline, year after year, until we were swept out to sea. My Daddy said we'll probably end up in Japan; but, at least foundation-remains of that precious abode can be found under and some feet out from original peninsula's perimeters.
More importantly, story/history of Phoenician lst explorers international merchants fascinates. They were out there navigating around Africa, 400BC, marketing goods of the Egyptian Pharoah Hanno. There is evidence that they hit the eastern shores of South America (Brazil,) and even of North America - where the winds carried them 2000 YEARS BEFORE COLUMBUS !
Because they lost Carthage, their western capitol, they lost to Rome which wrote the history. So, their finesse with first far-flung exploration, the invention of glass, our alphabet(they needed a means to record billings,) and even the Phoenician Hiram was chosen to engineer and build Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
We must rewrite this history by exploring Mediterranean and eastern South American underwater shorelines - with schooners, professional divers (Robert Ballard? who has already found the oldest ship (Phoenician,) naval archeologists, photographers, sailors, volunteers. Fact that Phoenicians are ancestors of Lebanese adds good value to our having American University in Beirut (and Cairo, also Colleges Istanbul, Aleppo). We could do so much to spirit life, intellect abroad - educate here !
Marine Archeology has been keenly featured in your articles and now I just itch to take the subject literally and physically so much deeper and further back into ancient history. Phoenicia is the STARTING POINT !
Appreciatively - elisabeth coats sherif
Posted by elisabeth coats sherif on August 14,2009 | 10:35PM
The photograph in the article seems to indicate this was a view from 1750! How is that possible? When was the photo taken?
Posted by Claire on August 31,2009 | 11:28AM
I wonder if people then were panicking over such unssen things as "global warming". By attributing everything today to global warming, we're no better than our ancestors who attributed everything to "God".
Posted by Charles on September 4,2009 | 06:40PM
What should you do if you think you discovered an ancient city lost at sea?
Posted by Angela Beaudoin on October 9,2009 | 06:54PM
I find it amusing that people see the loss of cities AS a loss.
Nothing holds humanity back like cities.
All great spiritual and intellectual growth has come from the death of cities and civilizations.
Rome had knowledge, but didn't apply it. It was only after the death of Rome that we could have the Renaissance. Rome had art, but little humanity. Without Rome, you get da Vinci and Michelangelo. As we now know, there were no Dark Ages, only recovery and appreciation of what had existed, but had been ignored. Then came the application of that knowledge, and a far, far better and more civilized world resulted.
So let the cities fall into the ocean. Only a fool would miss them.
Posted by Mike on October 14,2009 | 11:25AM