Marine archaeology in the Gulf of Cambay

Marine archeology in the Gulf of Khambhat - earlier known as Gulf of Cambay - centers on findings made in December 2000 by the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT). NIOT came across palaeo river channels in the sea. These were seen by the scientists involved to be the extension of the present day major rivers of the area. In a similar marine survey, in a Coastal Research Ship during 1999-2000 when Dr S Badrinaryan was the Chief Scientist, several unusual frames of Side Scan Sonar images were encountered. These had square and rectangular features in an arranged geometric fashion which are not expected by the scientist in the marine domain. As per the scientist involved such features are unlikely to be due to natural marine geological processes. This made the scientists suspect that human workmanship must have been involved here. The surveys were followed up in the following years and two palaeo channels of old rivers were discovered in the middle of the Khambhat area under 20-40m water depths, at a distance of about 20 km from the present day coast.

On 19 May 2001, India's Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Science and Technology division, Murli Manohar Joshi, announced that the ruins of an ancient civilization had been discovered off the coast of Gujarat, in the Gulf of Khambhat. The site was discovered by NIOT while they performed routine pollution studies using sonar, and was described as an area of regularly spaced geometric structures. It is located 20 km from the Gujarat coast, spans 9 km, and can be found at a depth of 30–40 meters. In his announcement, Joshi represented the site as an urban settlement that pre-dates the Indus Valley Civilization. Further descriptions of the site by Joshi describe it as containing regularly spaced dwellings, a granary, a bath, a citadel, and a drainage system. However it was later on 22 May, reported that the discovery has not been dated and the discovery (for example, great baths) resembles the Harappan civilization dating 4,000 years ago. Furthermore, the Indus civilization port Lothal is located at the head, Gulf of Khambhat.

A follow-up investigation was conducted by NIOT in November 2001, which included dredging to recover artifacts and sonar scans to detect structures. Among the artifacts recovered were a piece of wood, pottery shards, weathered stones initially described as hand tools, fossilized bones, and a tooth. Artifacts were sent to the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) in Hyderabad, India, the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany (BSIP) in Lucknow, India, and the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India. The piece of wood was carbon dated to an age of 9,500 years old.

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