Underwater site off Israeli coast draws archaeologists

Press, 28 September 1988, Page 51

Underwater site off Israeli coast draws archaeologists

NZPA-AP , Atilt, Israel Archaeologists with wet suits and diving tanks are working to rescue relics from an 8000-year-old village 12 metres beneath the sea before water destroys the last remnants of the ancient site. The village, which contains the remains of more than a dozen stone houses, wells and cooking hearths, lies about 400 m off the Mediterranean coast, some 16km south of Haifa. "It is the best-pre-served, Neolithic, underwater site in the world,” said Ehud Galili of the University of Haifa’s Institute of Archaeology and Maritime Studies. “We are carrying out a rescue operation because sea abrasion may soon destroy the site.” Each day for the next two weeks, Galili and his

team of about 10 underwater archaelogists and volunteer divers will head out in their rubber dinghy in groups of two or three for hourly underwater stints. While one diver uses a dredger to clear away the sand, another searches for more artefacts to study and preserve. So far, the project, now in its fifth year, has yielded 15 human skeletons, many of them almost intact; animal and fish bones; several kilograms of cultivated wheat and lentils; and utensils made of stone and bone, including arrowheads, knives and bowls. The Neolithic period was about 8000-10,000 years ago, before man learned to use pottery or discovered writing. “Most Neolithic sites a pi in P °° r condition ’”

said an underwater archeologist, Jim Dwyer, of the University of Pittsburgh. “Here we have the chance to find everything ancient man used in day-to-day life.” Dwyer, aged 36, returned to Atlit for the second year in a row to take part in the excavation. The underwater village is the only Neolithic site along the Israeli coast containing skeletons, according to Galili. And pathologists studying the bones are discovering details about how Neolithic man lived. The studies show, for example, that one villager suffered from arthritis and another was paralysed from the waist down. One villager used his teeth excessively —- to string fishing q|ts, Galili

believes — while another rowed a great deal. At least nine other sciences associated with archaeology have been applied to the findings. "We have studied the pollen of flowers to learn about the climate of the period, and applied car-bon-14 tests to determine how old the site is,” Galili said. The test involves the use of carbon-14 isotopes, which have a constant decay rate, or half-life, of 5730 years and thus can be used for dating. “ Galili was particularly excited to discover cultivated wheat because it helped place the village in the Neolithic period, when man, after 1.5 million years of hunting and foraging,. first began to cultivate his own food.