Ancient Cities Lost to the Seas
Dunwich, England, is one of several underwater sites where divers are discovering new information about historic cultures
- By Robin T. Reid
- Smithsonian.com, July 29, 2009, Subscribe
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?
“In the 1970s when I was a child playing on the beach, the last remains of All Saints church were visible on the shoreline,” Sear said in an e-mail. “Hence why I got fired up over the place!...The sand banks grow and decline over time, so there are periods when more of the site is exposed (1970s) and when they are not (now). As the coast recesses, so the banks migrate shorewards covering more of the site. The exposed remains lie in a tidal scour channel between the inner and outer bank. This migrates shorewards too; so in another 100 years different ruins may well be exposed, assuming the coastal morphology remains the same.”
Sear expects to find ruins of religious structures and forts, since they were made of stone. Houses were made of timber or wattle and daub.
Lead diver Stuart Bacon has found several objects since he began his exploration in 1971. One of the most exciting finds to date is a portion of a slab used to cover a knight’s tomb in 1320, a fine example of the prosperity Dunwich once enjoyed.
“Eight hundred houses... a dozen abodes of prayer and worship, windmills, workshops, taverns, shops, storehouses, ships,” wrote Rowland Parker in Men of Dunwich, the 1978 classic reference book about the town. “It would be difficult to think of an every-day commodity in existence in the late 13th century which was not obtainable in Dunwich market-place, either immediately or ‘when the next ship comes in from’ Copenhagen, Hamburg, Barcelona or wherever.”
The sea that brought trade to Dunwich was not entirely benevolent. The town was losing ground as early as 1086 when the Domesday Book, a survey of all holdings in England, was published; between 1066 and 1086 more than half of Dunwich’s taxable farmland had washed away. Major storms in 1287, 1328, 1347, and 1740 swallowed up more land. By 1844, only 237 people lived in Dunwich.
Today, less than half as many reside there in a handful of ruins on dry land. These include portions of the Greyfriars monastery and a corner of All Saints’ cemetery. Beachcombers have occasionally seen bones protruding from the cliffs, left over from burial grounds that are crumbling into the sea. And local fishermen over the years have said they heard bells tolling in the church towers from beneath the waves.
Ghostly sounds or not, the rediscovery of Dunwich continues. Sear wants to create a 3-D map of the church sites found so far. The group wants to expand the survey to cover other churches and structures.
“We’ve got to be in for some surprises,” he added.
Around the world, other sunken settlements have been explored or are the subject of current work:
* Kekova, Turkey: The partially submerged ruins of the ancient city of Simena are easy to see through the clear turquoise waters off Turkey’s southern coast. A massive earthquake buried much of Simena in the 2nd century AD. Tourists can swim near the ruins or see them from glass-bottomed tour boats.
* Port Royal, Jamaica: On June 7, 1692, an earthquake wiped out this Caribbean port, once known as “the wickedest city on Earth.” Two thousand people were killed instantly, and many others perished later. Nautical archaeologists have found eight buildings so far.
* Alexandria, Egypt: Divers have found remnants of Alexandria’s famous lighthouse in the bay, as well as Cleopatra’s palace. UNESCO is looking into whether the world’s first underwater museum could be built here.
* Mahabalipuram, India: Several manmade structures believed to be temples built in the 7th or 8th century surfaced off India’s southeast coast after the 2004 tsunami. Some believe they are pagodas that were part of this pilgrimage city, which is now a World Heritage site.
* Tybrind Vig, Denmark: During the late Mesolithic period (5600 to 4000 BC), people hunted, fished, wove fabric, and were buried in this new submerged settlement close to the west coast of the island of Fyn.
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Comments (18)
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In the 1980s a group of us were walking up a path on the coast near the village of Wenhaston in Suffolk. One of our number, a local man, remarked that he hadn't been there for a few years, when a man with a shotgun appeared and ordered us off his land.
Our friend protested that we were on a public footpath.
The man with the gun shouted that that particular path had disappeared into the sea and that we were trespassing!
Posted by Mike on August 16,2010 | 04:14 AM
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 | 02:25 PM
What should you do if you think you discovered an ancient city lost at sea?
Posted by Angela Beaudoin on October 9,2009 | 09:54 PM
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 | 09:40 PM
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 | 02:28 PM
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 | 01:35 AM
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 | 01:57 PM
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 | 01:16 PM
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 | 01:10 PM
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 | 12:40 PM
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 | 08:24 PM
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 | 09:01 AM
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 | 11:48 PM
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 | 06:30 PM
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