|
|
 | | |
|  | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
|
The Black Sea Flood: Archaeological and Geological Evidence
|
An International Conference at Columbia University, October 18-19, 2003
Hosted by the Columbia University Seminar on the Ancient Near East
Allan S. Gilbert, Conference Organizer &
Chair of the Columbia University Seminar on the Ancient Near East
SUMMARY
A two-day conference entitled “The Black Sea Flood: Archaeological and Geological Evidence” will be held at Columbia University in New York City on October 18-19, 2003 in the Altschul Auditorium of the School of International and Public Affairs. The meeting will be held under the auspices of Columbia University and its Office of the University Seminars. Admission will be free, all costs having been underwritten by the Columbia University Seminars, Institute for Aegean Prehistory, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Joukowsky Family Foundation, Turkish Airlines, and private donors. Registration for the conference is not necessary.
The presented papers will review geological and archaeological evidence for Quaternary transformations in the Black Sea basin, with specific focus on the sixth millennium BC inundation proposed by W. Ryan and W. Pitman. Only empirical evidence recovered through accepted earth and social scientific methods will be considered, however. Time will not be devoted to the speculative implications that link Black Sea events to biblical narrative, as is increasingly happening in popular archaeology books and media reports.
THE FLOOD
Beginning in 1993, Columbia University geologists William B. F. Ryan and Walter C. Pitman III, together with other collaborating scientists, recovered evidence that the Black Sea had attained its present size dramatically, possibly even catastrophically. By coring into the sea floor, they were able to confirm the existence of sediments representing a former brackish water great lake that was fed by river drainage out of northern Russia. Their findings confirmed the initial discovery over two decades earlier by David Ross and Egon Degens from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that the Black Sea floor is composed of a dark organic mud, or sapropel, of marine origin that overlies a light gray substrate of clay with a water content possessing very low salinity. The salt water intrusion that submerged the original lake and initiated sapropel deposition almost certainly derived from rising global sea level as the Pleistocene glaciers melted. When Mediterranean seawater began flowing over the sill of the Bosporus, its torrent etching a deep spillway channel, the Pontic depression was doomed. The newly expanding sea encroached inexorably upon the shores of the much smaller lake, and according to Ryan and Pitman’s dating, marine conditions prevailed by at least 5600 BC. The speed of the inundation, aspects of its dating, and the consequences for settled farming or mobile foraging populations displaced by the deluge are still under discussion.
Recently published evidence collected by another international team of marine geologists has complicated this picture. In the October 15, 2002, issue of the journal Marine Geology, new findings are documented that conflict with the flood hypothesis and suggest that the Black Sea was full and flowing outward into the Sea of Marmara over the past 10,000 years. The contradictory clues to the Black Sea’s behavior during the early post-glacial period represent a curious interpretive obstacle that can best be resolved by open discussion of a wide range of data and continued scientific cooperation, which both teams have consented to begin in the context of this conference.
Interest in research within the Black Sea basin is high for another reason. Improving technology has permitted increasingly effective study of submerged archaeological remains that lie beyond the reach of conventional underwater excavation. Recent sea floor exploration using robotic submersible vehicles has confirmed the presence of shipwrecks and former shorelines, and has demonstrated the potential for discovery of human habitation sites. As hostile as the Black Sea’s depths are to divers, they are extraordinarily friendly to archaeologists, because beneath the oxidized surface layer are anoxic bottom waters where the absence of dissolved oxygen has annihilated all life, minimized decay, and yielded extraordinarily good preservation of even organic remains.
The question of a refugee diaspora evacuating the Pontic basin in the face of rising waters is an archaeological question that has potentially testable implications based upon the distribution of ancient cultures in the regions surrounding the modern Black Sea. The conference will therefore bring together experts to review the known data and propose further studies that would fill the gaps. In addition, linguistic distributions of groups speaking Caucasian and Indo-European languages will be considered. Linguists have long recognized the commonalities of languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, Hittite, and nearly all the tongues of Europe. By working backward in time, “undoing” the various evolutionary changes that languages tend to undergo, the prime geographic area for the original proto-Indo-European language has been posited to lie somewhere between Ukraine and Central Asia. This region is adjacent to the Black Sea and thus, like the archaeological evidence from the circum-Pontus, the linguistic patterns may hold clues suggesting whether large-scale flooding created a mass egress that could help explain population movement within Eurasia. Perhaps, in concert with the archaeological evidence, the linguistic data might reflect in some way on the widespread turn to farming at the time based on the antiquity of agricultural words.
CONFERENCE PROGRAM
The conference program will be fully interdisciplinary, integrating archaeology, geoscience, and linguistics in a way that would be difficult to organize at the annual meeting of a single professional association. It will bring together for face-to-face discussions many of the principal scientists involved in primary research into the Black Sea flood so that international and interdisciplinary collegiality is encouraged, and the potential for future collaborative fieldwork is maximized. Results of earlier research as well as the discoveries of summer 2003 will be reviewed, and a “plateau” of current knowledge will be assembled from which further hypotheses can be tested across disciplines.
Speakers are grouped into four panels, each based on a theme and each taking up a morning or afternoon session. An hour of questions and discussion among the conferees and audience will come at the end of each panel, after all the papers have been presented. Specific starting times to be announced.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2003
INTRODUCTION AND WELCOME
8:45-9:00 AM
PANEL 1: THE FLOOD; DISCOVERY, DATING, AND ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES
Walter C. Pitman, III, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
Topic: Discovery of the flood
9:00- 9:25 AM
William B.F. Ryan, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
Topic: New developments from continued explorations
9:30-9:55 AM
Ali E. Aksu, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland
Topic: Seismic, stratigraphic, and stable isotope evidence from the Black, Marmara, and northeastern Aegean Seas: alternative interpretations
10:00-10:25 AM
Michael A. Kaminski, University College, London
Topic: Glacial to Holocene benthic foraminifera in the Black, Marmara, and northeastern Aegean Seas
10:30-10:55 AM
DISCUSSION
11:00 AM-12:00 PM
LUNCH BREAK
12:00-2:00 PM
PANEL 2: ANATOLIAN AND BALKAN COASTAL SITES AND THEIR INTERPRETATION
Mehmet Özdoğan, Istanbul University
Topic: The Black Sea flood in archaeological perspective: prospects and questions
2:00-2:25 PM
Hristina Angelova, Center of Underwater Archaeology, Sozopol, Bulgaria
Topic: Black Sea coastal changes and underwater excavations of the Bulgarian littoral
2:30-2:55 PM
Peter I. Kuniholm, Cornell University
Topic: Dendrochronology of submerged Bulgarian sites
3:00-3:25 PM
Owen Doonan, California State University, Northridge
Topic: New Evidence for the emergence of a maritime Black Sea economy
3:30-3:55 PM
Douglass W. Bailey, Cardiff University
Topic: Holocene changes in the level of the Black Sea: consequences at a human scale
4:00-4:25 PM
DISCUSSION
4:30-5:30 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2003
PANEL 3: BLACK SEA BASIN, HYDROLOGY, & PROSPECTS FOR UNDERSEA DISCOVERY
Andrei L. Tchepalyga/Valentina Yanko-Hombach, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow/Avalon Institute for Applied Science, Winnipeg
Topic: The late Quaternary history of the Black Sea and its adjacent basins: a critical overview of the flood hypotheses
9:00-9:25 AM
Yücel Yilmaz, Kadir Has University, Istanbul
Topic: Morphotectonic evolution of the southern Black Sea regions
9:30-9:55 AM
James W. Murray, University of Washington
Topic: The Black Sea: oxic, suboxic, and anoxic layers
10:00-10:25 AM
Fredrik T. Hiebert, University of Pennsylvania
Topic: From mountain-top to ocean bottom: comprehensive archaeological research along the Black Sea coast
10:30-10:55 AM
DISCUSSION
11:00 AM-12:00 PM
LUNCH BREAK
12:00-2:00 PM
PANEL 4: UNDERSEA DISCOVERIES AND CULTURAL DISTRIBUTIONS TO THE NORTH & EAST
Dwight F. Coleman & Robert D. Ballard, Institute for Exploration, Mystic, CT, & University of Rhode Island
Topic: Marine archaeological exploration of the Black Sea
2:00-2:25 PM
David W. Anthony, Hartwick College
Topic: Steppe populations north and east of the Black Sea between 6200-5500 calBC: the flood and the transition to food production
2:30-2:55 PM
Valentin Dergaciov, Moldavian Academy of Sciences, Chinisau, Moldova
Topic: Transgressions of the Black Sea and the Neolithization of Eastern Europe
3:00-3:25 PM
Carlos E. Cordova, Oklahoma State University
Topic: The Mediterranization of the southern Crimean flora during the Holocene
3:30-3:55 PM
Johanna Nichols, University of California, Berkeley
Topic: Origins of Eurasian language families in relation to the Black Sea flooding
4:00-4:25 PM
DISCUSSION
4:30-5:30 PM |
|
| |
| | |
|
|
