New Frontiers 



Around the shores of the Mediterranean there 

 are about forty submerged cities that have 

 yet to be excavated. This tasl< can be 

 carried out only by archaeologists who have 

 also been trained as divers. To date there 

 are few such scholars, but the aqualung and 

 underw/ater camera are gradually becoming 

 standard archaeological equipment In 

 some universities. 



From 5000 B.C. to the fall of the Roman Empire more than 

 three hundred major ports and coastal cities were constructed in 

 the Mediterranean. Between these cities were thousands of fishing 

 villages, minor trading ports, and seaside villas. Since their con- 

 struction there has not been a large eustatic change in sea level, 

 but there have been many localized earth movements and many 

 great estuaries have been silted up. As a result, about half of the 

 original cities are now below sea level, together with their asso- 

 ciated minor ports and villas. Of these 150 submerged cities, half 

 again are obscured by modern buildings or have been completely 

 destroyed, so that there are probably seventy-five submerged or 

 partially submerged sites to be explored. During the last hundred 

 years nearly forty of these have been studied, so that there are only 

 about thirty-five to forty left. 



As the number of large and obvious targets dwindles, divers are 

 paying more and more attention to the minor sites, and searching 

 farther afield for more obscure and exotic ones. An example of this 

 trend is shown by Count Gargallo, an enthusiastic underwater 

 archaeologist from Sicily, who set out in i960 to find the lost island 

 of Chryse, which is mentioned in the Odyssey as being on the route 

 to Troy. It was here that the Greek archer Philoctetes was fatally 

 bitten by a viper after refusing the advances of a local nymph. 



Chryse was known to be near the island of Lemnos. After 

 studying the naval charts Gargallo selected the Kharos bank as the 

 most likely site. The bank is nine miles east of Lemnos, ten square 

 miles in area, and only about forty feet deep. Here he found heaps 

 of rectangular white stone blocks, which are thought to be the 



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