Settlement Found Under the Sea Is 'Like a Time Capsule'

Below the dark blue waters of Denmark's Bay of Aarhus, archaeologists are searching for coastal settlements swallowed by rising sea levels more than 8,500 years ago. And this summer, divers descended about 26 feet below the waves close to Aarhus and collected evidence of a Stone Age settlement from the seabed, per the AP. It's all part of a $15.5 million, six-year international project to map parts of the seabed in the Baltic and North seas, funded by the EU and including researchers in Aarhus, as well as from the UK's University of Bradford and Germany's Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research. The goal is to explore sunken northern European landscapes and uncover lost Mesolithic settlements as offshore wind farms and other sea infrastructure expand.

• Most evidence of such settlements so far has been found at locations inland from the Stone Age coast, said underwater archaeologist Peter Moe Astrup. After the last ice age, huge ice sheets melted and global sea levels rose, submerging Stone Age settlements and forcing the hunter-gatherer human population inland. Moe Astrup said that about 8,500 years ago, sea levels rose by about 6.5 feet per century.
• Moe Astrup and his colleagues at the Moesgaard Museum in Hojbjerg have excavated an area of about 430 square feet at the small settlement they discovered just off the coast. Early dives uncovered animal bones, stones tools, arrowheads, a seal tooth, and a small piece of worked wood, likely a simple tool. The researchers are combing the site meter by meter using a kind of underwater vacuum cleaner to collect material for future analysis. "It's like a time capsule," Moe Astrup said. "When sea level rose, everything was preserved in an oxygen-free environment ... time just stops."
• To build a picture of the rapid rise of the waters, Danish researchers are using dendrochronology, the study of tree rings. Submerged tree stumps preserved in mud and sediment can be dated precisely, revealing when rising tides drowned coastal forests. "We can say very precisely when these trees died at the coastlines," Moesgaard Museum dendrochronologist Jonas Ogdal Jensen said. "That tells us something about how the sea level changed through time."
• The researchers hope that further excavations will find harpoons, fish hooks, or traces of fishing structures. Excavations in the relatively calm and shallow bay and dives off the coast of Germany will be followed by later work at two locations in the more inhospitable North Sea.