Town Beneath The Waves

In a chance find just off Greece’s Peloponnese, archaeologists have discovered the remains of a once-thriving Early Bronze Age settlement.

- Daniel Weiss

In the summer of 2013, Julien Beck, an archaeologist from the University of Geneva, was swimming in the Bay of Kiladha, off the east coast of the Peloponnese in Greece, when he spotted something unusual. “I started seeing lines of stones underwater,” he says. “I really could not believe what I was seeing.” A closer look the next summer revealed potsherds as well. His interest piqued, Beck and his team devoted much of their 2015 and 2016 seasons to investigating what they now regard as the underwater remains of a third-millennium b.c. site that was inhabited by Early Bronze Age people whose building projects demonstrated great ambition. “Even on the seafloor, you can see that you have many different structures and what seems to be part of a fortification system,” says Beck. “It is clear we are dealing with a submerged settlement of some importance.”