The island of Santorini is all that remains of a sunken volcano, a ring of cliffs rising from the Aegean Sea. But for the people who lived here in the Bronze Age, it was a thriving civilization. Tim Druitt is a geologist who has spent years trying to understand what happened to them. He has been using ground-penetrating radar to map the land as it existed before the catastrophic eruption of 1600 BC.
The volcano exploded with a force at least three times greater than Krakatoa in 1883. Volcanic dust settled in Turkey and the Nile Delta. Tidal waves crashed down on the north coast of Crete, swamping everything in their path. It was a cataclysm unlike anything in human memory.
But beneath the ash and volcanic rock, Druitt made a startling discovery. He found pumice solidified on top of much older rock, proving that the caldera, the steep cliff-lined crater, existed long before the Bronze Age explosion. This ancient cliff line, he realized, extended down to present-day sea level. At the time of the eruption, the caldera was already flooded, just as it is today, with a channel leading to the open sea.
It was then that Druitt compared his geological reconstruction to a description of the lost city of Atlantis, written by the Greek philosopher Plato in 300 BC. The similarities were striking. A central island surrounded by water. A circular harbor.
A channel to the sea. Plato wrote that the Atlanteans quarried stones of white, red, and black. The cliffs of Santorini today are exactly those colors. He described springs of hot and cold water on the central island.
On Santorini, volcanic hot springs still rise to the surface today. The legend of Atlantis describes how the island was swallowed up by a gigantic flood. The eruption of Santorini, and the tsunami it generated, fits that description perfectly. Druitt believes the story Plato handed down was not pure fiction, but a distorted memory of a real historical event, a retelling of the destruction of the Minoan civilization by the eruption of Santorini.
But not everyone is convinced. Another theory points across the Atlantic, to the island of Bimini in the Bahamas. In 1926, an American psychic predicted that Atlantis would be found there. He sent a follower, who hired a local fisherman named Bonefish Sam.
One day, Sam took him to a spot he had known since childhood. When the man jumped overboard and looked down, he surfaced shouting, “We found it. Here it is. ”
Beneath twenty feet of water lay what looked like a stone road.
Large, rectangular blocks were arranged in straight lines, intersecting at right angles. They called it the Bimini Road. Bill Donato has been leading expeditions there, convinced it is a man-made structure. “When you go overboard, the first thing you see is this huge arrangement that looks like an underwater pavement,” he says.
“Stones intersecting at right angles. Dead straight alignments. It looks very artificial. ”
Donato collected rock samples and sent them to a laboratory in England for analysis.
Geologist Kevin Phipps examined thin slices of the stone under a microscope. The results were not what Donato had hoped for. “This is not a particularly good limestone for pavement work,” Phipps concluded. “The individual grains are bonded together so loosely that heavy wear rates could be expected very rapidly.
As far as I can see, this is not a road at all. ”
For Phipps, the Bimini Road is most likely a natural formation, created by the steady action of waves over thousands of years. He admitted he would love to believe in Atlantis, but the evidence does not support it. The mystery of Atlantis remains unsolved.
But the search for other ancient civilizations continues. On the island of Malta, midway between Europe and Africa, deep ruts are cut into the limestone. They seem to start nowhere and lead nowhere. From the air, they look like a railway system.
The locals even call part of it Clapham Junction, after the busy London station. The ruts are so ancient that archaeologists cannot agree on when they were made. Professor Anthony Bonanno believes they date from Roman times. He traced them back to ancient quarries, where Roman builders extracted blocks of stone measuring 61 by 21 inches.
He found an exact match for those measurements in a wall in the Roman foundations of the town of Medina. For Bonanno, that solved the mystery. The ruts were made by Roman carts carrying stone from the quarry to the building site. But his colleague, Frank Ventura, disagrees.
He walked the entire island, measuring the tracks. The width of the ruts is not even, varying by as much as ten centimeters. A fixed-wheel cart would have gotten stuck. The shape of the ruts does not match a metal-rimmed wheel.
Ventura believes the ruts were made by a different vehicle, a slide car, a heavy platform dragged on two long wooden poles. To settle the argument, the two men staged an experiment. They took their theories to a beach and dragged both a Roman-style cart and a slide car across the sand to see which one left deeper ruts. In the end, Bonanno conceded.
The slide car made deeper tracks. He still believed Roman quarrymen made the ruts, but he agreed the vehicle might have been different. Slowly, ancient civilizations give up their secrets. In the 1880s, a workman in Mexico unearthed a colossal stone head, almost five feet high.
Over the next century, more were found. But it was only gradually that archaeologists realized what the swamps of Central America concealed. Beneath the plateau of San Lorenzo lay the remains of the Olmec civilization, three thousand yers older than our own. Ann Cyphers has devoted her career to studying them.
“The Olmec were the first civilization in Mesoamerica,” she says. “They set the pace and started the whole trend of cultural evolution. ”
The greatest day of her career came when she found a colossal head in a ravine. She and her team had been searching for a different artifact, but they never found it.
Instead, they found the head. It was only the seventeenth one ever discovered. The head was lifted carefully from its hiding place of thousands of years. In the village, the men prepared a new home for it, a museum of their own.
Every other head had been shipped to the capital, but this one was staying. The villagers noticed it looked like someone they knew, so they gave it a nickname. They called it La Venta. A year later, the villagers celebrated the anniversary of the discovery.
For Cyphers, the heads are deeply meaningful. “They show an image of a particular person. Each one is very distinct. The facial features are very individual.
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The head she found has clearly Asian features, with a distinctive eyefold and a cross-eyed gaze that was considered a mark of beauty by the Olmec. The eyes are slightly sunken, with bags underneath, suggesting an older man. The nose is wide and slightly flattened. Cyphers believes each head represents a ruler.
Not only does each have a different face, but a different headdress, too. The headdress on her head features a claw with three digits, which may have represented the ruler’s name. Some researchers have suggested the heads depict Africans. Cyphers disagrees.
She sees predominatly Asian features, reflecting the American Indians who first crossed the Bering Strait from Asia. “The Olmec civiliz ation arose here in southern Veracruz,” she says. “There are no words to explain the feeling you get when you see for the first time a face that nobody has seen f or 3,000 years. It’s a thrill that cannot be repeated.
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The story of Atlantis remains a puzzle. Some still believe in the lost city, while others see it as science fiction. The history of civilizations that have gone and died is hard to reconstruct. Perhaps it is na willful.
It may say that we should be wary of adopting tourist theories, of seeing human creation. And the scars of the past are true.
