‘Atlantis’ hunt for hidden Wales
Submitted by coldrum on Tuesday, 28 September 2010 Page Views: 4456
Other ArchaeologyCountry: Wales Archaeologist Dr Andrew Petersen, who earlier this year unearthed a town – complete with a fort, mosque and homes – which had been lost beneath the coastal sands at Ras al-Sharig, Qatar, for centuries, is now turning his attention to Wales. Working with a team of Welsh academics, he plans to help map some of the ancient underwater landscapes which have remained hidden just miles out to sea from the coastal towns of Wales for thousands of years.He says evidence of dry stone and willow walls which are a familiar aspect of the Welsh mountainous landscape today can also be found in the nation’s hidden seascape, together with fossil forests and peat bogs.
The team aims to find out more about the extended Welsh ancient landscape which still remains submerged today and the Welsh hunter-gatherers who originally laid the willow walls as ancient fish traps.
Dr Peterson said: “Wales and Qatar happen to have some of the best-preserved fish traps in the world.
“They are mostly woven from branches of willow or made of stone. And they look like dry stone walls under the sea.
“We believe they date back thousands of years, possibly to prehistoric fishermen, although we are not entirely sure how, when or why they were built.
“These fish traps, that can stretch for miles, can still be seen under water now and some of the best are in the Severn Estuary and at Fishguard in Pembrokeshire.
“We believe they date back to the times when mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers roamed Wales. And fishermen would probably have caught octopus and cuttlefish in them.
“Both the Irish Sea and the Arabian Gulf are shallow seas, so a large amount of their areas would have once been land, before the sea levels rose.”
Dr Martin Bates, an environmental archaeologist and a specialist in undersea landscapes at Lampeter University said: “Landscapes that were previously dry 6,000 years ago and beyond are buried under the sea all around Wales.
“At low tide, you can see evidence of fossil forests off the coast of Borth and Clarach Bay in West Wales. And drills below sea level two or three miles off the coast of Aberaeron have recovered peat deposits and pollen from when the area was developing water marshes.
“We know that 20,000 years ago, the sea around Wales was 125 metres below its current level. The current sea level was established 6000 years ago, when the last of the big game hunters were returning to Britain after the last Ice Age and moving into caves in Pembrokeshire and Gower.
“10,000 years ago, the ice melted, sea levels rose and the temperature warmed to its current level and there was a switch to Mesolithic hunters, chasing forest animals and marine life.
“These Welsh mobile hunters would have undoubtedly lived in skin tents and huts on the edge of the dense forests near rivers and would have made axes and stone tools.
“We are going to use multi-beam sonar surveys to look beneath the sand banks and see what is under the sea bed above the rock, that relates to the last Ice Age. This new science is still in its infancy.”
The project will be discussed at the Nations of the Sea Conference at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff this weekend.
Read more at Wales Online
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