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OTHER STORIES RELATED TO COVER The World In 7500 B.C. Rewriting History Life In Cambay City

Cambay could mean that the early Indians were not copycats and that civilisation arose in the subcontinent as an organic process that stemmed from the genius of its own people. Yet, as Lahiri points out, there are many interesting questions that still need to be answered: where, for instance, did the people of Cambay come from? Were they natives or did they come by sea from West Asia? When did they transit from hunter gatherers to agriculture and a mature urban settlement?

"If the dates are true, it could totally alter our notions of history." Dilip Chakrabarti, Cambridge University

""It could provide the missing links in understanding the rise of cities." Jagat Pati Joshi, Former DG, ASI

"It calls for an international probe similar to the Titanic search." Richard Meadow, Harvard University

"The big question is where the Cambay people came from." Nayanjot Lahiri, Delhi University

Jagat Pati Joshi, former director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), thinks the answers to such questions could "provide the missing links" that historians have been searching fruitlessly for years. Historians have little evidence to show how a predominantly farming community in the Indian subcontinent took that giant leap forward in imagination and built some of the most well-designed cities in the world during the Indus period. Says Joshi: "Cambay opens for us the horizon of early settlements in the Neolithic Age in India that were hitherto known to exist only in West Asia which may have powered the phenomenal transformation."

For archaeologists the word certainty is an oxymoron. The origin of the glass bangle was initially believed to have been the result of Indo-Roman contacts in the 1st century A.D. Then bangles were found among the painted greyware of Hastinapur dating 7 B.C. The ornament's antiquity and origin was pushed further back when they were more recently found in Harappan settlements of 2000 B.C. As S.P. Gupta, chairman of the Indian Archaeological Society, says, "Nothing is static. Dates are constantly being revised by newer findings. The discovery of the Harappan site of Dholavira in Gujarat, for instance, pushed all our dates back by 1,000 years."

NIOT's findings has triggered tremendous interest and controversy among leading historians across the world. Harvard University historian Richard Meadow, an expert on South Asian archaeology, believes that a neolithic site in Cambay would "be very much in line" with developments in Mehrgarh and in West Asia during that period. But he thinks it is improper to take "wild guesses" as to whether it was the earliest known city and wants a well integrated research project to validate the findings. Says Meadow: "The discovery is important enough to launch an international collaborative study as was done to uncover the sunken ruins of the Titanic.

Other senior scholars vehemently question the basis on which NIOT drew its conclusions. At the University of Pennsylvania, US, archaeologist Gregory Possehl, who has excavated many Harappan sites in India, points out that "there is no scientific reason" to believe that the fossilised wood piece that was dated back to 7500 B.C. is linked to the ruins in the sea bed. Given the strong tidal movement of the region it could easily have been swept from elsewhere.

That is something that even Cambridge's Chakrabarti points out. The NIOT team acknowledges that both historians have a point. S. Kathiroli, who heads the team, says in the months ahead they are going to send other key artefacts for dating to see if they corroborate the initial findings.

Much of the reason for the seemingly haphazard research is that the NIOT team's expertise doesn't lie in archaeology but in oceanography. Kathiroli readily admits that he had his last history lesson decades ago in school.

ROAD TO FASHION Huge amounts of semiprecious stones and beads indicated that dressing up was in

When the team first made its speculation public in May last year, many experienced archaeologists brushed their theories aside as poppycock. One even suggested that they had possibly mistaken an old shipwreck as plenty of them are known to have met watery graves off India's west coast.

Stung by the criticism, the team left nothing to chance. When they sailed again for the site in November, apart from consulting experts on how to go about the task they took along marine geologist S. Badrinarayan. This time they equipped themselves with a robotic vehicle fitted with a video camera that they hoped would take sharper underwater photographs. They also took a dredge and a scoop to pick up as many samples to prove that the city did exist. On the surface, the Gulf of Cambay, where they were prospecting looks serene. But some of the fiercest tidal currents in the world churns the bottom of the ocean leaving a muddy concoction in its wake.

GEMS OF CLUES: Fairly advanced bead-making capability using a variety of stones was evident from the findings

Video photography using the robot soon proved futile as visibility was near zero. So the team again had to rely on sonar photography. The dredge also kept snapping making the collection of artefacts a nightmare. It was only the findings that kept their spirits going. "We were dumbstruck when we saw the human remains. Most of us dreamt of ghosts that night," recalls Badrinarayan.

These findings doubled their enthusiasm and even the crew members participated in the sieving work to find artefacts in the tonnes of sludge they hauled up each day from the bottom. It was when they pulled up the fossilised log of wood that the team knew it had struck gold because its age could easily be determined through a technique called carbon dating.

A STONE-AGE TOOL: The site produced a profusion of neolithic implements

Eyebrows were raised among academic circles when Union Minister for Human Resources Murli Manohar Joshi made the team's findings public at a press conference in Delhi on January 16. Many believed that the team should have first published its findings in a reputed scientific journal as it would have bestowed it with far more credibility.

Having a senior Union minister like Joshi involved has its benefits. It has helped the team convince the Government to launch a national multi-disciplinary project to uncover the mysteries that the lost city of Cambay has thrown up.

A host of specialist institutes will now assist the NIOT including the ASI, the National Institute of Oceanography in Goa, the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad apart from the NGRI, BSIP and a cluster of universities. Joshi is convinced that "the impact of the discoveries will be far reaching" and that "several areas need detailed investigation".

Among them is to understand how the city got submerged and ended up 30 km off the coast. Harsh Gupta, secretary, Department of Ocean Development and a geologist of repute, believes it could have been a massive earthquake that caused destruction. The region falls in the high seismic risk zone and last year's earthquake in Bhuj showed just how vulnerable the state is. In 1819, another massive earthquake saw land in some place lift up by 6 m creating the famous Allah bandh.

Yet the most important quest is to conclusively establish the age of the sunken city of Cambay. Clearly just dating a piece of wood found on the site is far from satisfactory. Also merely using a dredge to pull up artefacts without marking the strata from which they were removed from-vital to good archaeology-makes convincing findings difficult.

True the team was handicapped by lack of experience and equipment. Also as Kathiroli points out: "Even 75 years after the discovery of the Harappan ruins we continue to excavate sites and discover that we don't know enough. So please don't expect one expedition to answer all the questions."

In the coming years, the probe into Cambay's true antiquity if done thoroughly could, like the discovery of the Ice Age man, become the most exciting find of this century.

-with Arun Ram in Chennai