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00:00Off the southern coast of mainland Greece lie the ruins of a city founded over 5,000 years ago.
00:14It seems to be an incredibly advanced culture there.
00:17People were living in buildings with two stories, they had flushing toilets, they had drainage systems, they had the beginnings of writing.
00:25This city thrived for 2,000 years, during the time that saw the birth of Western civilisation.
00:35Pavlopetri is one of the first places in Europe where we begin to see buildings and streets and people living side by side in a way of life that we would recognise today.
00:48But then the city vanished, consumed by the sea.
00:52Now an international team led by underwater archaeologist John Henderson has come to unlock the secrets of this mysterious sunken city.
01:06We're really excited, mate, this is great!
01:11Using the latest 21st century technologies, they plan to digitally rebuild the city, stone by stone.
01:18This is maybe just a little glimpse of prehistoric suburbia.
01:30Thought to be the oldest submerged city in the world, now for the first time, the secrets will be revealed.
01:37Of Pavlopetri, the city beneath the waves.
01:43For Nottingham University archaeologist Dr John Henderson, the sunken city at Pavlopetri provides a unique glimpse into a lost world.
02:01The site itself just begins a few metres off the coast here, and that's a very rare thing.
02:12In a way, this is like an underwater Pompeii. It's a settlement frozen in time.
02:18The city dates to the Bronze Age, over 3,000 years ago.
02:25This was the time of Troy, King Agamemnon, and Homer's Odyssey.
02:32You've got one line of stones going up there, and you've got another line of stones going up there.
02:42And this is one of the main streets of Pavlopetri.
02:47People walked down here, this was a busy street.
02:51On this side you just have a wall, and on this side here, we actually have a range of houses, a range of domestic dwellings.
03:04The Bronze Age was a time of great change, when people started living in towns for the first time,
03:12with trade and exchange of cultures and ideas.
03:15Pavlopetri is a blueprint for our own way of life.
03:24This was a place, this was a thriving city where people used to live.
03:28You get a sense of some sort of major drama has happened, a major catastrophe.
03:37It's quite an eerie feeling.
03:38Located just off the coast of Laconia, in the southern Peloponnese, this area is prone to violent earthquakes and tsunamis.
03:52Coastal towns have always faced the constant threat.
03:56I want to know what happened to the city of Pavlopetri.
03:59I want to know who was living here.
04:01I want to know what they were doing.
04:03I want to know why they left.
04:04I want to know why it's underwater now.
04:07I want to make that immediate connection with people and just get a brief insight, even just for a moment, of what it was like to live in those times and live in the Bronze Age.
04:19To answer these questions, and learn about the origins of our own way of life, John wants to try and recreate the city in every detail.
04:28He's flown in a team from Sydney University, led by Oscar Pizarro and Matt Johnson Robeson.
04:38They've brought with them prototype mapping devices to create three-dimensional surveys of the site.
04:44This idea of using 3D reconstructions, I think, is a very new thing for archaeology, and from that perspective, it's really exciting for us.
04:53Working alongside the scientists, John has also invited movie visual effects expert Simon Clarke.
05:00He wants him to try to digitally recreate Pavlopetri using the actual archaeological data.
05:10Our role is basically to try and recreate the finds, to be able to recreate the buildings, and then hopefully to be able to give a fantastic impression of what the city would have once looked like.
05:20Working in collaboration with a team from the Greek effort of underwater antiquities, they've been granted a three-week permit to complete their work.
05:37After a year of planning, the archaeologists head out for the first dive of the expedition.
05:42The first step to understanding what life was like in Pavlopetri thousands of years ago, is to search for items the inhabitants left behind.
05:58The team get help from the sea itself. The shifting underwater currents naturally excavate the site, constantly bringing new artefacts to the surface.
06:26It's got a part of a rather nice jungle here. Pouring water and pouring wine.
06:41Every object they find is photographed, before it's labelled and bagged.
06:46Its location is then recorded using a pole with a prism on top,
06:50which reflects back a laser beam sent out by a land-based ranging device.
07:01With their knowledge of artefacts from other sites, the archaeologists immediately have an idea of what the objects might be,
07:09and even how they were used.
07:11It takes a highly trained eye to make out some of the more obscure artefacts.
07:12It takes a highly trained eye to make out some of the more obscure artefacts.
07:24This is how they would have grown their grain, or grown their lentils.
07:27They were going to go around and store it, and just grown the grain down.
07:30Grinding cereals, grinding cereals, grinding pulses for food. This is just a general domestic item.
07:31But that's nice.
07:32It's a nice!
07:33OK, it's so much more than a human being.
07:34This is how they have grown their grain, or grown their lentils.
07:35This is how they would have grown their grain, or grown their lentils.
07:39Then we could have gotten rounded stone, and just grown the grain down.
07:40Grinding cereals, grinding pulses for food. This is just a general domestic item.
07:46But that's nice!
07:53for food. This is just a general domestic item, but that's nice.
08:09With all the finds bagged and tagged, they're sent off to the processing area back at base
08:14camp.
08:23As part of his role to create a detailed view of life in Pavlo Petri, Visual Effects Supervisor
08:29Simon Clarke wants to rebuild some of the key finds from the site. Using a laser scanner,
08:38he can digitally capture the exact 3D structure and surface textures of each sherd.
08:44We've got something which is totally real, so we're making our pot, when we reconstruct
08:54it, as scientifically accurate as we possibly can. Using the laser scans, the visual effects
09:01team can now start to reconstruct some of the ancient artifacts. They've sought guidance
09:05from John's finds expert, Dr Chrysanthi Gallo.
09:12This is an open vessel. We can say so because it's decorated in the interior.
09:20This looks quite thick here. Would that have been the thickness all the way through the shape?
09:24No, it would guess like it gets a little bit opening here and then get thinner as we move up.
09:30Even the simplest of artifacts can be hard to recognize at first.
09:34I don't think it's like that.
09:38I don't think it's like that.
09:40The neck should be higher.
09:42Yeah, I mean, so, you know, these shapes will now look very, very familiar.
09:45Yeah, definitely. The same needs bring the same shapes.
09:50By rebuilding the finds, the team can start peering into the everyday lives of the inhabitants.
09:57The simple cooking wares used for soups.
10:01The fine crockery that was brought out for guests.
10:06These were fired at high temperatures to give a resounding clink when struck together.
10:13And for very special occasions, including funeral rites,
10:18they used a large two-handled goblet, known as a killix.
10:31The site is actually just strewn with pottery.
10:34This is the tablewares they used.
10:36It's the high-status vessels they used when they had guests round for tea.
10:40It's the vessels they used to make offerings towards the gods.
10:43So we can directly touch the people of the past through touching their pottery.
10:46Many of the pieces found from the site are coming from what is known as the Mycenaean period,
10:53dating from 1600 to 1100 BC.
11:03The Mycenaeans were a warrior people, led by wealthy and powerful rulers,
11:08like the legendary King Agamemnon.
11:12At the heart of their civilisation was a network of hilltop fortresses.
11:17The most famous was at Mycenae.
11:21Legend has it that these walls were so huge they were built by one-eyed giants, the Cyclops,
11:31since no mere mortal could have built them.
11:37From their network of fortresses, they used their military might to control trade throughout this whole region of Greece.
11:46Trade that would have passed through harbour towns, like the one at Pavlopetri.
11:51But unlike the well-documented city of Mycenae, no mention has been found for a port at Pavlopetri.
12:05It lay forgotten under the waves for over 3000 years, until it was discovered purely by chance.
12:12In 1967, oceanographer Dr Nick Fleming was working along the coastline, searching for ancient harbours,
12:25when he stumbled upon the ruins.
12:28I looked at these rows of stones, and I just had no idea what it was,
12:33but I realised immediately that it was man-made, that we were looking at a large part of a town,
12:40and, I mean, I just went crazy.
12:43I grabbed my plastic board and started scribbling and drawing and everything.
12:49I had been arrogant enough, when I was in Athens, to write in the visitor's book,
12:54Gone South to Look for Bronze Age Harbours.
12:57So, here we were in the south, and we'd found a Bronze Age harbour.
13:01So, I was very pleased.
13:06The following year, Nick returned to the site with a group of students from Cambridge.
13:09Armed with just tape measures and pencils, the group attempted to survey the site for the first time.
13:18I mean, all surveying tapes were sort of canvas, but they weren't really waterproof.
13:25You took them in the water and it all started to stretch and fray.
13:30Things were measured with tape and string, simply to triangulate, measure the two sides of the triangle off the baseline,
13:41and gradually build up the map.
13:44Using basic techniques, the university team created the very first survey map of Pablo Petri.
13:50The town appeared to consist of 15 buildings, located off two main streets, with an area extending to just under four football pitches.
14:03Here you've got rows of houses on a street. The preservation is incredible. There is absolutely nothing like it.
14:10Since the 1960s, no one has done any further survey work on this important site. Until now.
14:20To get an idea of the full extent of the ruins and the area where the city once stood, John is taking to the sky.
14:33This is the first time he's seen Pablo Petri from the air.
14:55I'm glad I didn't eat those.
14:56Many of the buildings that Nick surveyed in the 60s can be seen.
15:05But beyond the original mapped area, something catches John's eye.
15:10I can see new buildings just full of Pablo Petri Island.
15:17And I can see lines of what I think are buildings, square lines.
15:21That makes the site much, much bigger.
15:23It's bigger now to the north and bigger to the south.
15:27So that's a pretty major discovery.
15:33From his high vantage point, John starts to see how the city could have operated as a harbour.
15:40You would have had ships coming in, trading throughout the whole of the eastern Mediterranean,
15:45trading with the people of this city.
15:47The site would have been sitting right at the entrance of a sandy bay.
15:52And that would have been an ideal location for a beach of ships.
15:56That was what a Bronze Age harbour was.
15:58It was just a protected sandy bay.
16:03It's incredibly exciting because it's suddenly putting the site in context.
16:06John also spots clues, which could help work out how the city succumbed to its watery grave.
16:17The other exciting thing that we've seen is old shorelines.
16:21And this is perhaps a clue as to how the site went underwater.
16:25So the city is bigger than originally thought, and was located in the perfect spot for a harbour.
16:35But to understand how it functioned as a whole, John is keen to start a detailed survey.
16:40Rather than string and tape measures, he's bringing underwater archaeology into the 21st century.
16:57Coming straight, you'll see this whole range of buildings there.
17:01The team of scientists from Sydney University have been researching ways to produce a 3D photo map of the sea floor.
17:08They've built a prototype push-along device called a diver rig.
17:14The diver rig is basically just a surfboard with a pair of cameras mounted on it.
17:18So the same way you can use your left and your right eye to figure out the distance to things,
17:22the diver rig has two cameras, and we use that to figure out the distance to rocks on the sea floor.
17:26So from that we can build up a 3D model of all the stones on the site just using those two pictures.
17:33It allows you to feel like you're actually there, sitting on the bottom.
17:38Pushed back and forth over the survey area, the rig takes thousands of digital photos of the sea floor.
17:46Harsh shadows caused by bright overhead sunlight were confusing the software, so the work is carried out at dusk.
17:55The first results are very promising.
18:00So what we did is we imaged the side and the edge of a very small building in the site, just to see if we can see the individual stones.
18:05And it was really exciting because we actually could, if you look here you can see, we can count the individual rocks which build up the foundation of this building.
18:16And so it's a really unique look under the sea. Basically it's the equivalent of draining the ocean, taking pictures and filling it back up.
18:22Using the push-along rig, they continue to survey key parts of the site.
18:30But to be able to map the whole city, including the new buildings John saw from the air, the Australian team have been developing a secret weapon.
18:41At first glance, it may look like a torpedo, but this is the very latest in autonomous underwater robotics.
18:51In addition to the diver-held unit, we've brought a proper robot. It has a much better suite of navigation instruments that allow us to build a better map more easily, cover more ground and avoids the tedious aspect of having to swim around with a camera when you're trying to cover a large area.
19:13The mapping torpedo stands at the cutting edge of underwater archaeology.
19:23As the robot has never been used before, it still needs further testing before they let it loose on the site.
19:30They hope to survey the entire city, completing the job in a matter of days.
19:35The 3D photo mapping data will eventually be used to help digitally rebuild the city.
19:49But to get the visual effects team up and running, John has a line-drawn site plan to give them an overview.
19:57How am I able to identify what are buildings and what are streets here?
20:01The red lines there are picking out the streets. So we have five or six main streets that we've recognised so far.
20:08We have a main street going up here, a street up there, a street running along this reef here.
20:14The blue lines are actually marking out building complexes. These are the domestic structures. These are the houses.
20:22Then we have yellow, which is actually marking out courtyards. There's a lot of open space in this city.
20:26There's probably people out, you know, threshing, drying their clothes, grinding their cereals and so on, and talking to their neighbours probably.
20:36We can tell the courtyards because they have less stone, there's less rubble, they have lower walls.
20:41And is there any evidence to suggest what was on there?
20:44The visual effects team can now start to extrude the walls of some of the buildings, directly on top of the archaeological site plan.
20:50Probably there's paving in some of them. How are the buildings split up in terms of the division of the rooms?
20:56What you've got is you've got a range of buildings around a courtyard.
21:01So you've got, I think, about one, two, three, four, five, six separate rooms, at the least, around a courtyard with an entrance into it.
21:11The walls are more or less correct, but we've got a bit of work to do with the height of some of them.
21:15Although the foundations of much of Pavlo Petri have been preserved, rebuilding the city will have to be based to some extent on interpretation.
21:26Fortunately, rare yet vital clues exist from other Bronze Age sites.
21:31This fresco from the ancient city of Akrotiri, on the Greek island of Thera, is one of the only depictions of a Bronze Age town.
21:47It dates to 1550 BC, and shows neighbourhoods of neat brickwork buildings, even roof terraces.
21:55The fresco also indicates this was a time when people took to the sea, and began widespread maritime trade.
22:04To find clues to Pavlo Petri's trade links, the archaeologists are expanding their search of the site.
22:23Quite delicate, you can see the base of it, something that sat like that.
22:30This probably dates to 2000 BC.
22:36This is one of three legs for a standing ball, something a bit about this size.
22:45They're finding objects that date from almost 2000 years before the Mycenaean period.
22:55This implies the site may be much older than first thought.
23:00John also starts to find key evidence of local industry.
23:06This is a loom weight. You can see it's got a hole in it, so we're hanging on a loom, preparing textiles and making textiles.
23:18So we know that we're making clothes here.
23:21We've got literally hundreds of these on the sea floor. These are loom weights.
23:27These are used for hanging from a loom, for making textiles essentially.
23:32They must have been making it on a very large scale, maybe even an industrial scale.
23:36Maybe this is one of the main things that they were sending out into the Eastern Mediterranean and trading with other cultures.
23:41This is a significant discovery and suggests a thriving textile industry.
23:51And with trade, there would have been wealth.
23:54Even the most innocuous finds tell an elaborate story.
24:00This is quite an exciting fight because it's a roof tile and you only get roof tiles on sites with quite serious buildings, important buildings of roof tiles.
24:10It's a good fight.
24:16Your average house would have had a flat timber roof, but once we've got roofs with roof tiles on it, it makes you think there's somebody important living there.
24:24The building is saying something about the inhabitants. It's saying, you know, it's more monumental.
24:29So it's raising the status of this town, previously thought just to have been a harbour town.
24:33We now think it's a city. We're now getting big buildings and evidence of big architecture.
24:40This kit will work a bit more for a different building and that's a part of the building itself.
24:44To help better understand the possible structure of the buildings of Pavlo Petri, John is taking Simon to an old farmhouse in a nearby village.
24:54John sees architectural similarities that span the millennia.
25:00architectural similarities that span the millennia almost everything you've got
25:07here this sort of general layout of a hundred-year-old farmstead up to the
25:11modern day we can see a Pavlopetri and that shows you how advanced Pavlopetri
25:16was and perhaps the only difference is the building complexes in Pavlopetri
25:21there are a range of rooms built around a courtyard rather than an isolated
25:25building like this it's remarkable that house design in this area appears to have
25:33changed very little in the last 3,000 years so the stones here would be like the
25:39stone foundations of Pavlopetri and then on top of that you'd have the clay and
25:44timber framework we think that the design of the buildings has something to do
25:49with resistance to earthquakes we're in a very very active tectonic zone probably
25:54one of the most active earthquake areas in the world and as a result we think
25:58that the foundations of the buildings were made out of stone supporting a
26:02timber framework and plastered with clay or with mud bricks because that would
26:06move in an earthquake it would be less likely to collapse
26:12would they have all been pitch roofs or would some be flats as well I think a
26:16Pavlopetri we've probably got both and I say that because we found in quite a
26:21range of rooftops with actual ridges on them for hanging them up along at
26:24pitched roof so it would have been very similar to this to make his digital
26:29recreations as accurate as possible Simon wants to know what color to paint
26:34the houses John draws inspiration from the Bronze Age frescoes it might have been a
26:42mark of status that there would have been different colors for different
26:44buildings and we know they were using yellow ochres and red oxides to produce a
26:49range of colors from sort of pink to browns so it's a it's a city awash with color
26:54people are living there it's an exciting place to be and I want to capture a bit of
26:59that
27:09back at the site John is convinced that two of the large buildings just off the main
27:17high street a prime examples of domestic dwellings here we have possibly one of the
27:23first neighborhoods on mainland Europe so that's here is the entrance to a Bronze Age house people
27:34would have been living about three four thousand years ago so what we have is a square ground floor room
27:43and we've got the entrance doorway here marked by a stone threshold and on this there would have been
27:52built a wooden doorway an entrance into this building what we actually see on the site are just the foundation walls
28:03and on top of these walls would have had a timber framework
28:13and then either mud brick or clay and plaster wall in a number of the houses have sunk into the floor
28:30the bottoms of storage vessels and this is probably where they were storing the grain perhaps wine or olive oil
28:37and it's a bit like a son of a bronze age fridge
28:49John believes the people living here would have had bedrooms upstairs
28:53the walls and the connections suggest that it's probably more than one story high it was probably a two-story building
29:08these villas are made up of possibly seven to ten rooms
29:15while the ground floor may have been used for storage and possibly keeping animals
29:19wooden staircases would have led up to living quarters on a second floor with windows and possibly a terrace
29:36so this is maybe just a little glimpse of prehistoric suburbia
29:40from their discoveries the team now believe there was some important wealthy people living in pavlo petri
29:47and that it was a harbor town that thrived on trade possibly textiles
29:52just down the high street from the domestic dwellings
29:53one of the other prominent buildings has caught john's attention
29:59there's so much evidence of a storage field
30:04trade, possibly textiles.
30:11Just down the high street from the domestic dwellings, one of the other prominent buildings
30:15has caught John's attention.
30:20There's so much evidence for storage here. There's so many broken pieces of storage
30:31in the middle, way beyond what somebody would need just for a normal house.
30:36And that makes us think that this is a building of a different function than the houses elsewhere
30:41on the site, and perhaps this is some sort of administrative function.
30:46So if that's true, this might be one of the most important buildings of the whole of the site.
30:53The building appears to have had several narrow oblong rooms located at the back.
30:58In one of these are the remains of a huge ceramic jar called a pithos.
31:05This is the edge of a 4,000 year old storage vessel.
31:10You can see the handle of the storage vessel.
31:15And we know that there is at least half a metre of deposit to excavate underneath here.
31:22There's a pithos sitting just in that building, right in the middle of there, which we've actually marked.
31:30Back at base, John has brought his findings to the attention of the co-director of the project,
31:35Elias Spondilis, from the Greek team.
31:38We get an exact point, then we get the fines number, we lift it and it's out.
31:41So we don't have to measure.
31:43He's agreed for a small excavation to take place to try and lift the large pithos jar.
31:49This is the first ever excavation on the site.
31:52The Greek team established the boundaries of the dig site and set out what is known as a water dredge.
32:07Right, the basic underwater technique of excavation is not a trowel, it's not a spade, it's just your hands, okay, with a water dredge.
32:20It effectively works like a vacuum cleaner and it allows us to very carefully remove sand and silt around the artefacts.
32:32The sand and silt get sucked up and deposited several meters from the dig.
32:45Throughout the next few days, the excavation proceeds under the direction of the Greek team, with the divers working in shifts.
32:53It's a very delicate operation.
32:57This is the top of it.
32:59This is the top rim.
33:01These are the handles for actually moving it around, maybe lifting it onto ships or with ropes or so on.
33:10You would use them in your house, you could sink them in your floor.
33:14But equally, they were used for transporting all sorts of items in the Bronze Age.
33:19Everything from wine, olive oil, grain to ceramics.
33:24You actually sometimes find smaller pots inside these vessels.
33:36In the corner of the excavation, a second pithos starts to emerge.
33:41This adds weight to John's suggestion that the building was some sort of storage depot.
33:46These jars could give clues as to who the city was trading with.
33:56John wants to try something never done before.
33:58He's asked the mapping team to use the push-along survey unit to see if they can produce a daily 3D photo map of the trench as it's being excavated.
34:09As night falls, the team download the data to see if the plan has worked.
34:26There's a new pot coming up in this corner, can you tell?
34:30Stitching together the photos, it looks like they have been successful.
34:34So far it looks quite convincing.
34:38You can see that outside of the trench, most of the site is recognizable and you can see more of the main pithos, the jar, the clay jar.
34:49But you can also start to see perhaps another jar coming up in the corner and perhaps a bit of burnt coal or something on another area.
34:59Real-time 3D photo mapping of an active underwater excavation has never been done before.
35:06So we can look at the evolution of the trench over a period of time, which should show us what they've been doing every day with the excavation.
35:18This is great for archaeology because you can then in a sense re-excavate the site.
35:23It allows us to then step backwards through time and see each layer of the site individually.
35:28And as opposed to having to record everything manually, now you can record everything digitally and then preserve it.
35:34So it speeds things up quite quickly.
35:37And actually you're getting more accurate plans than you would have done drawing them.
35:48The excavation doesn't just help understand what was going on in this building,
35:52but also how the city itself fitted into the wider Mediterranean world.
36:03You can just see these little circular decoration pieces on it, if I just get it a bit clearer there.
36:13They're just stamped on when the clay is still wet.
36:17This decoration went right round it.
36:19This vessel probably came from Crete.
36:28The design and build of this pithos jar suggests it was made between 1700 and 1500 BC.
36:36It would have been used for storage or transportation of a range of goods.
36:41The pithos is similar to hundreds that have been found within the ancient palace of Knossos,
36:47on the island of Crete.
36:52Crete is the largest of the Greek islands,
36:55and lies southeast of Pavlopetri.
37:03It was home to the Minoan civilization, dating back over 5000 years.
37:07Knossos was their most lavish of palaces, boasting over 1500 rooms, running water, and even flushing toilets.
37:25The Minoan palaces weren't fortified.
37:27Their civilization thrived without any great military strength.
37:32They had a strict social hierarchy, were pioneers of writing, and flourished through trade.
37:39Minoan cultural influence spread far beyond the island of Crete.
37:44Not by military might, but by a network of trade routes, reaching all corners of the Mediterranean.
37:53Just up the coast from Crete, on the island of Kythera, was a Minoan colony called Kastri.
37:59There's strong evidence that Minoan traders lived there.
38:02And trading links would have extended north to the mainland.
38:08Right through Pavlopetri.
38:18John believes the city was an active trading hub.
38:22Seeing the passage of imports and exports from all over Bronze Age Greece.
38:26The key to understanding Pavlopetri is the location.
38:32It's basically at the gateway of the mainland Peloponnese.
38:36If you're trading anything, if you're sailing from the eastern Mediterranean,
38:39and you're coming into mainland Greece, you've got to pass by Pavlopetri to get up towards Sparta.
38:46So, just its very location meant that it was always going to be a good place to have a settlement by the sea.
38:56Back at base camp, the visual effects team continue with their work to digitally rebuild the city.
39:06They've started reconstructing the storeroom building.
39:10And what's your first impression of that?
39:12It looks fantastic. I'm really excited by it.
39:15There's a few things I would change straight away.
39:17This part here, I think, probably wasn't roofed, and I know why you've done that.
39:21I think this courtyard, there may have been some sort of entranceway, there may have been something demarking that.
39:28With his knowledge of other Greek Bronze Age settlements,
39:31John can use the reconstruction to piece together what may have happened within the building.
39:39Seeing it like this is really making me think about how this building actually worked.
39:42Maybe you had carts coming in here, filled with goods, and they're unloading them and taking them into here.
39:49If you imagine it almost like a public council building or something.
39:53And you go into the first room and it's probably a waiting room with a bureaucrat waiting to record what you've just brought in.
39:58At the front of the building were the admin offices, where imports and exports may have been checked in and out.
40:13Towards the rear, located in the long narrow outhouses, the large pithos jars would have stored items ready for dispersing.
40:29We had people here capable of complex administration, complex buildings, and sort of an almost modern way of life. We can identify with this.
40:45The city not only shows evidence of local administration and organised trade, but it's starting to look like they were actively trading with the Minoans on Crete.
41:06With their time on the site rapidly coming to an end, the team are finding more and more older artefacts.
41:12So this is quite an exciting flight, dating to around 4,000 years ago.
41:30You can just see more parts like the site.
41:36This is great, so let's get it lifted up.
41:39As well as storage vessels, a strong Cretan influence is now coming through with the domestic wares.
41:50Absolutely fantastic.
41:53Well found, it looks absolutely brilliant.
41:57We can recognise it as a palatial amphora.
42:01That's the new palacepedia in Crete.
42:04It's a really diagnostic shape.
42:07We can put it about 1700-1600 BC.
42:11It's a pouring vessel and junk essentially, but it's a really brilliant find.
42:15It's in great condition, and it's giving us a really nice tight date of something that's going on around here.
42:21The Cretan-influenced finds don't just mean the city is older than first thought.
42:33They are starting to reveal Pavlopetri as a cultural melting pot.
42:38We're beginning to get things that are putting us directly in touch with the people.
42:43You can imagine, you know, somebody 4,000 years ago was using this little pot lid and it's still complete.
42:49The same with this, you know, little bottle for pouring some sort of liquid.
42:53We have this situation where we have the people of Pavlopetri copying Cretan styles.
42:59We've got this change from people using indigenous pottery forms.
43:02Pottery forms you'd find in the mainland, but they're making them in Cretan shapes,
43:07but they're still making it out of local pottery.
43:09So it's like they're adopting the fashion.
43:12The ceramic jug is thought to be an exact copy of a bronze metal amphora.
43:18The detail in the spout and the line around the neck is seen on metal version.
43:22of the jug found in Crete that would have been much more expensive to produce.
43:28The people of Pavlopetri are copying the lifestyles of the rich and famous in some ways.
43:33It's a bit like, you know, buying a cheap copy of a rich fashion label or something like that.
43:38So it's like buying into the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
43:41Why not have a Manon jug in your home as well?
43:43You can get it at a knockdown price in ceramic and you're getting some of that cachet
43:48of having, you know, the latest fashions in your house.
44:00Cultural insights aren't just coming from artefacts.
44:03Clues to the inhabitants' belief systems and even social structure
44:09could be seen in the way the people of Pavlopetri took care of their dead.
44:14Some of these tombs date to nearly 5,000 years ago.
44:19This is probably one of the only indications that there's an archaeological site here from the shore.
44:28We've got about 60 rock-cut tombs just following a line of bedrock which would have overlooked the city.
44:36For the first time really in the Bronze Age we're beginning to see attitudes towards death
44:45and disposing of the dead in some ways or sending them on to the next life.
44:49We're beginning to see attitudes towards the dead which we can recognise in our own society.
44:56The inhabitants appear to have had a close relationship and respect for their dead.
45:01But not everyone was entombed in such grand structures.
45:07This is what's called a cyst grave.
45:10And what you have is four slabs placed in to create a small compartment,
45:18almost like a coffin, almost like the kind of thing we would imagine a grave to be today.
45:23But what's interesting is how small it is.
45:27And we think that these graves were used for the burials of children.
45:37There are over 40 cyst graves across the city, all located inside buildings.
45:46Each would have had a stone slab to seal the tomb.
45:49John has a theory why they buried their children in their homes.
45:52What people were doing was keeping the children that had died close to them after death in the sort of house space.
45:55Perhaps to encourage fertility in the household, or to make sure there will be more children along the way.
46:01As well as connections with the afterlife, the team is finding that social and social and social and social and social.
46:07that had died close to them after death in the sort of house space,
46:13perhaps to encourage fertility in the household
46:16or to make sure there'll be more children along the way.
46:26As well as connections with the afterlife,
46:30the team is finding that social standing is also reflected in death.
46:38Cut into the ridge of rock, running along the eastern edge of the city,
46:42are two huge rock-cut chamber tombs.
46:49And this is the entrance passage into a central chamber.
46:55I suspect this is one of the most preeminent graves in the whole of the site.
47:03There was probably only for one or two very important people.
47:07This would have been entirely carved out of rock.
47:15And this is where people would have come and laid out their dead.
47:24These tombs date to the Mycenaean era
47:27and are like today's large family crypts.
47:30They could be reopened to add additional bodies or conduct rituals.
47:37These impressive structures were for the elite leaders or ruling families of Pavlopetri,
47:43boasting the best resting place overlooking the city.
47:47It appears the city's inhabitants had a complex and multi-layered social hierarchy.
47:58We've got some evidence that people are beginning to have defined roles within that society,
48:04even professions, you know, there being craftsmen or merchants or even soldiers.
48:12And you're beginning to see some level of status in society.
48:15And it's interesting that that's now being reflected in the burials,
48:19where we're now beginning to see tombs reflecting probably some level of status.
48:23The people of Pavlopetri lived in a vibrant city with a structured society and organized trade.
48:34So how did a culture so advanced disappear under the waves?
48:40Its fate has been puzzling oceanographer Nick Fleming
48:46ever since he first discovered the site over 40 years ago.
48:51When you find an underwater city, the problem always is did the land go down or did the sea come up?
48:59Here at Pavlopetri, there's a lot of explaining to do.
49:03Pavlopetri stood at a time when global sea level was on the rise,
49:09still fed by water melting from the last great ice age.
49:13But Nick believes that wouldn't have been enough to drown the city.
49:21Greece is one of the most geologically active places in the world.
49:27Throughout history, there are records of huge earthquakes, giant tsunamis and vast volcanic eruptions.
49:35Could it be that Pavlopetri was sent to its watery grave in one single cataclysmic earthquake?
49:49Clues to the answer lie in a set of strange underwater rock formations,
49:55which are actually ancient fossilized shorelines.
50:03You find strips of what looked like concrete,
50:06laid almost like a paving strip along the beach,
50:09which is actually a natural cement formed by the action of sunlight on the sand with the salt water.
50:16And that can give you exactly where the sea level was of past dates.
50:20These ancient shorelines are what John originally saw from the helicopter.
50:26They are made up of something called beach rock and show up as dark strips lying parallel to the sandy shore.
50:34Beach rock only forms at the water's edge, so these parallel strips show where the beach would have been at different times in history.
50:50John wants to get a sample from the individual lines of beach rock to track the times of the changing shoreline.
51:04Hopefully we'll get a rough date of the formation of this coastline, this old shoreline,
51:10and that might tell us something about when Pavlopetri was submerged.
51:19The idea of a massive subsidence and a sort of huge tidal wave and molten lava and ash coming down out of the sky is very attractive,
51:28and of course it does sometimes happen.
51:30But unfortunately for the Hollywood movie people, it doesn't seem to have happened here.
51:36The presence of successive lines of beach rock indicates there was more than one seismic event.
51:45From the radiocarbon dating process, it appears Pavlopetri sunk in at least three earthquake events, the first coming soon after 1000 BC.
51:58Each time the land dropped, more of the remaining buildings were claimed by the sea.
52:04You've got a grand city which has seen better days, but slowly as the edge of the town become waterlogged,
52:11winter storm takes away some of the key buildings, and then finally you're left with just a few houses sticking out of the water and it's gone.
52:21And I find that an attractive, rather sad image, but it's just as human and just as moving as blowing the whole thing up in one night.
52:30With only a few days left, and all testing complete, the mapping team are finally ready to deploy their robotic surveying torpedo.
52:47Just like the push-along rig, bright sunlight interferes with the cameras, so they have to run the robot at night.
53:00I think this is the first time this has been done on a submerged archaeological site.
53:04It's quite an important moment, just seeing it go in the water was fantastic.
53:08The plan is to survey the entire site in just a couple of nights.
53:14A job that would normally take months. The stakes are high.
53:19It's always a bit disconcerting, I guess, to put a machine that costs several hundred thousands of dollars into the ocean
53:27without a way of knowing what it's going to do exactly.
53:31Following a programmed route, the torpedo moves across the site at around two nautical miles an hour,
53:40with its twin cameras photographing the sea floor three times a second.
53:46After just a few nights' work, the team have got some impressive results.
53:51They've succeeded in completing a stone-by-stone photomap of the entire city.
53:58This is fundamentally going to change the way we do underwater archaeology.
54:03I mean, you can't get any better than this in terms of underwater survey.
54:08The other thing about doing this is it allows you to create views which are actually impossible otherwise.
54:13If we had this, in reality, we'd be way out of the water, we'd be right above the sea.
54:17So it allows us to examine the city in different ways.
54:23Using the millimetre accurate 3D photomap of the whole city,
54:27the visual effects team can now finish building Pavlo Petri and digitally raise it from the sea floor.
54:32But to apply the final touches, Simon has one last job to complete down on the beach.
54:49By capturing the way the sunlight falls on the mirrored ball,
54:55Simon can reproduce exactly how the sun would have bathed the city itself thousands of years ago.
55:02We want to be able to get a map of this light to add to our computer model
55:08to give us a very realistic interpretation of what the city would have once looked like.
55:16We've had the very detailed archaeological survey,
55:19but then we've enhanced that with the visual effects team to reconstruct, bring the city back to life.
55:24By digitally recreating the city stone by stone, we can at last glimpse Pavlo Petri through the eyes of its inhabitants.
55:37I'm really blown away by the fact that, you know, they can actually reconstruct whole buildings
55:49from just the really basic kind of robotic models that we generated.
55:52It takes the city from a pile of artifacts and stones and really turns it into something that the public can visualize.
56:04Some parts of the city are missing from the sea floor, washed away by wave action.
56:09But guided by the spread of pottery sherds and isolated foundation stones,
56:14plus clues from other Bronze Age town plans,
56:17John believes this is what the complete city might have looked like.
56:23Bringing the city back to life actually creates a closer connection with the site,
56:27and perhaps a closer connection with the people who used to live there.
56:33Based on the age of artifacts found across the site,
56:36this is an impression of Pavlo Petri at its peak, around 1600 BC.
56:44It was a city with a planned layout.
56:49People lived alongside each other, in neighborhoods.
56:55They had large houses with courtyards, upstairs bedrooms, and views of the sea.
57:04So we get people such as merchants, we get craftsmen, scribes, administrators,
57:09probably even prostitutes, we get slaves, we get a wide range of people.
57:14The kind of thing we would expect in a busy, mixed port town.
57:22Starting as a small, presumably fishing village, and developing into a very busy port,
57:28with connections throughout the Aegean Sea initially, then with Crete,
57:31and then with the whole of the eastern Mediterranean,
57:34and the kind of complexity and development that that would have had for the city itself.
57:38For me, that's the big story of Pavlo Petri.
57:40Pavlo Petri was an active harbour town.
57:47It stood as a gateway to the mainland,
57:51not just where imports and exports changed hands,
57:55but a meeting of minds and an exchange of ideas.
57:59It's making us realise that the people were very much like you and I.
58:06And they were living lives which are not far distant from the lives we live today.
58:12We're actually seeing the dawning of the West in some way.
58:15We can begin to trace that back to sites like Pavlo Petri.
58:18After the first NHS day on Sunday, BBC Four pays tribute to black nurses,
58:29the women who saved the NHS next,
58:32and in an hour, the final part of our drama.
58:35Based on Andrea Levy's bestseller, the long song is at ten.
58:39We'll see you next time.
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