Submerged Lands in Science, Memory and Myth

The traces of much of human history – and that which preceded it – lie beneath the ocean surface, broken up and dispersed, buried and overgrown, and generally a mystery to us.  This is fertile ground for speculation, even myth-making, but also a topic on which science has become increasingly focused in the last few decades.  We now know enough to tell the true story of some of the continents and islands that have disappeared throughout the earth’s history, to explain how and why such things happened, and to unravel the effects of submergence on the rise and fall of human civilizations.  The implications of all this for our current situation and future challenges are becoming far better understood.

In a nutshell, this is the essence of my latest book, released in August 2021 from Bloomsbury. The stunning cover (below) is that shown on the Bloomsbury website where you can order the book. The list of chapters is here. Reviews of the book are here. Some memorable quotes are here.

Some of the things discussed –

Observations of memorable events (like the loss of coastal lands as a result of a rise in the ocean surface) have been preserved in pre-literate cultures all over the world, systematically passed on (largely orally) as stories (sometimes evolving into myth) from one generation to the next.  Such stories discussed in Worlds in Shadow include Haida Gwaii (Canada) stories that may date from around 12,700 years ago, Narungga (Australia) stories that have remained extant for at least 9330 years ago, and Celtic (France and UK) stories about ‘sunken cities’ that may recall events that took place more than 8000 years ago.

So many stories that most of us have hitherto treated as fictions, as expressions of cultural or place-based identity, can now be regarded otherwise.  Examples discussed in Worlds in Shadow include fragments of tales from the Outer Hebrides (Scotland) that recall how a hunter and her greyhounds once roamed the (now-underwater) lands between the islands of Harris and her native St Kilda (see photo below).

Also discussed are the ancient traditions of now-submerged lands in the mysterious islands of Yap (Micronesia) and Vanuatu (southwest Pacific), and stories about Niccolò Pesce and the underwater treasures he recovered while diving off the coast of Naples (Italy) (photo below).

Our understanding of why coastal lands have disappeared in the past can help us understand our future world – and how best to cope with the unavoidable changes we and our descendants will encounter.  One example in Worlds in Shadow comes from the Gold Coast, Australia (see picture below), another from the Florida Keys.

Yet an important lesson is that we are still here, just as our children’s children’s children will one day be able to say, but we can learn from the past that short-term ‘adaptation’ to submergence, while often comforting, is not adequate to cope with its long-term nature.

Periodically catastrophe happens.  Coastal land slips away abruptly.  Entire islands explode and vanish.  The people of these places often have little warning.  Examples discussed in Worlds in Shadow include the Störegga Slide (Norway) about 8150 years ago, the 1964 Prince William Sound Earthquake (Alaska) in which parts of Montague Island were submerged two metres within a few seconds, and the island-destroying eruptions of Santorini (Greece) around 1620 BC and Myojin-Sho (Japan) in 1953, shown below the last time it was ever seen.

Many true mysteries are discussed in Worlds in Shadow.  Where was the thriving medieval port city of Muziris (India), marked on the map below, and why did it abruptly vanish from history in the year AD 1341? 

What happened to the boat named Island Queen, pictured below, after it left Grenada (Caribbean) in 1944 and was never seen again? 

How did the Micronesian island named Nahlapenlohd disappear shortly after the pitched battle it hosted around the year 1850?   We know where it used to be – see below.

Drawing on different sources of information – science, memory and myth – compelling explanations for these and other pervasive mysteries involving land disappearance are presented.

How this book came about –

Anxiety levels were high in the post-World War II decades (into which I was born) and anxiety was increased by the threat of nuclear catastrophe – many young people like myself sought reassurance from what others had inferred about the distant past, particularly about the supposedly-wondrous worlds our ancestors inhabited that now lie deep beneath the ocean surface.  Stories of places like the fabulous (and invented) island-continent of Atlantis where advanced civilizations had allegedly once existed but had become extinguished – all these were hugely attractive subjects for popular belief.  While the Atlantis story is unquestionably fiction, Plato used real catastrophic events from the eastern Mediterranean to enhance the plausibility (and thus the memorability) of his narrative.  Being trained as a geologist eventually allowed me to understand the nature of such events.

When I was based (for more than two decades) at a university in the heart of the Pacific Ocean, I became aware that there were indigenous (Pacific Islander) stories about ‘vanished islands’ that did not all appear to be inventions.  I realized that in different geological situations, it is sometimes possible for land to disappear abruptly although in other situations, as a result of slow sea-level rise, land could disappear slowly.

I remember one day being in a small boat travelling back to the capital of Fiji, Suva, from the offshore island of Moturiki where I had been doing some field research.  We crossed the deep-water passage named Davetatabu and the boat slowed down, all the people aboard (including me) removed our headgear, fell silent, and bent our heads to show respect to the spirits dwelling on the ocean floor, the people of a drowned land called Vuniivilevu.  I was captivated by the way in which modern protocols of this kind kept alive memories of ancient catastrophes; since that occasion, I witnessed similar events in other places.

Then a few years ago, working with French archaeologists, I was able to visit several places along the coast of Brittany where there are folk traditions about ‘drowned cities’ offshore (see picture below).  I am convinced that most of these traditions recall times when the sea level was lower and people did (of course) live further seawards of where they live now.  The drowning of the land is attributable to post-glacial sea-level rise which continues here but ended in places like Australia (where there is an abundance of such ‘drowning stories’) around seven thousand years ago.  I am convinced that many of these stories are memories of these traumatic events (land loss, future uncertainty) and that, in most cases, they were passed on orally for thousands of years to reach us today.

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Some memorable quotes from ‘Worlds in Shadow’

In a world where we are confronted by global change that is as contemptuous of human endeavour and individual aspiration as it is dismissive of political borders and agendas, understanding how our ancestors were affected by comparable changes and how they overcame these is at once a lesson in coping as well as a beacon of hope (page 13).

The sun casts a long shadow across the Dunwich coastline in the late afternoon, rendering the sea dark and fathomless. Lights come on in the pretty, quintessentially English village, speckling the marsh mists drifting in from the north that might otherwise envelop it.  At such times older residents often swear they can hear the mournful sounds of tolling bells, not bells from any churches on the land but those beneath the sea, rung perhaps by ghosts, perhaps by waves churning around the drowned church steeples (pages 35-6).

... there are many other stories about such undersea lands that are false, although there is inevitably an excitable pseudoscientist pandering their duplicitous wares on every street corner ready to assure you otherwise. So too you can find a ubiquity of bearded panjandrums and bespectacled professors on cable TV willing to cast doubt on any evidence-based judgement you might be tempted to make about the authenticity of a particular tradition. The whole business is confuddled by the way in which many ancient stories have become embellished so that their modern forms, in service of a particular agenda, may be grotesque caricatures of the original (pages 73-4).

… just as the Kongemose people altered their diets, switching from mostly landbased foods to seafoods as sea level drowned the lands of their ancestors, perhaps their dogs too became pragmatists. Seeing how their usual diets could not be sustained, perhaps they decided to ally themselves with humans, exchanging their independence for a social compact that would see them forever fed. I don’ t know about your dog, but mine nods sagely when I quiz her about this (page 98).

We may privilege the comforting rationalism that science provides about past sea level changes, but there is no question that knowledge about these from millennia-old
eyewitness accounts was available to us far earlier. So overgrown were these accounts with the vines of narrative embellishment that we failed to recognise them for what they were.  But perhaps, just perhaps, in some obscure set of synapses in the rafters of our brains, ancient memories linger about times when the sea level was so much lower. Memories we might one day dust off and activate to help us rationalise the renewed drowning of the world we inhabit (page 141).

Imagine you are in eastern Spain, somewhere like Valencia, and you are enticed into a smart seafood restaurant to lunch on their special mussels-and-seafood spaghetti. Or you are a little further south, perched on a high stool propping up the bar at a beachside chiringuito and, feeling peckish, order a plate of tapas that includes steamed clams, freshly harvested. You are actually not so different to the people of this area 9,500 years earlier who also consumed shellfish from the ocean shallows along its coast (pages 150-1).

… certain objects commonly used by coastal peoples thousands of years ago were invested with symbolic meaning and power. An example are the fish hooks made from elk bone used 10,000 years ago by the Mesolithic inhabitants of the Skagerrak coast of Norway and Sweden. The elk was … considered a liminal creature able to cross the boundary between land and sea more effortlessly than humans, which may have suggested to them it had a privileged relationship with the ocean, even able to intercede on behalf of humans and quell the ocean’ s periodic bursts of fury that made fishing and travel impossible (page 299)

So next time you are wandering a deserted stretch of coastline and you come across a scatter of boulders, imagine what they might represent. Perhaps the remains of an attempt to stop the apparently unremitting encroachment of the sea on to the land. Perhaps a reminder that off this particular coast there once stood places – villages, towns and cities – that people once inhabited, places now forgotten or at best stirred into the soup of folklore and mythology (page 301).