Though we never did catch up with Fred Hiebert this past September, it wasn’t hard to find out what he was up to. While the Robert H. Dyson Assistant Professor of Anthropology was on a ship named Northern Horizon in the Black Sea, 12 miles off the coast of Turkey, his name was splashed across newspapers around the world.
Hiebert, who is also assistant curator of Near Eastern archaeology at the University Museum, was serving as chief archaeologist on a National Geographic Society-financed expedition led by underwater-explorer Robert Ballard [“Gazetteer,” July/August 1999]. And on September 9, that team—using sonar and a remotely operated vehicle named Little Hercules—discovered remains of Stone Age structures and other evidence of human habitation, more than 300 feet below the Black Sea.
“From my perspective, what we’ve done today is of world importance,” he said in an online interview with the National Geographic Society. “This is a major discovery that will begin to rewrite the history of cultures in this key area between Europe, Asia and the ancient Middle East,” he added in a press release.
The expedition’s find provides new evidence of a tremendous, catastrophic flood that some believe could have inspired the biblical story of Noah. More than 7,000 years ago, according to a theory advanced by oceanographers William Ryan and Walter Pitman of Columbia University, the rising waters of the Mediterranean Sea—fed by the melting polar ice caps—finally burst through the narrow, then-dry Bosporus in a cascade that would have dwarfed Niagara Falls. In their 1997 book Noah’s Flood, Ryan and Pitman argue that the water that poured into the Black Sea—then a freshwater lake—would have widened its surface by as much as a mile a day. Those living along its shores would have had to flee or drown.
While Ballard’s objective six years ago was to find a Bronze Age ship in the Black Sea’s anaerobic depths, Hiebert told the Gazette shortly before the first expedition got underway in the spring of 1999 that the team intended to survey the shallower areas, too, in the hopes of finding a settlement.
On the morning of September 9, the team went to “one of the most promising” of the shallower sites, along an ancient river channel 95 meters (311 feet) under the sea. It was, said Hiebert, “quite distinct”—a rectangular site roughly four meters across and twice that in length.
“It was astonishing … here were hewn beams in a rectangular form along with branches that seemed to be stuck in layers of mud,” Hiebert said. “What we were looking at was a melted building made out of wattle and daub.” It was, he said, “the typical type of construction for the ancient inhabitants along the Black Sea coast. And here we’re seeing it under 300 feet of water.”
With the help of Little Hercules, they also found and photographed stone tools and fragments of ceramics. Since then, the expedition has recovered several objects from the bottom of the sea.
Hiebert acknowledged that they need to “study [the structure] more to understand its date,” and to examine the surrounding land to understand the building in the “context of its settlement structure all along the coast.”
But if further study confirms their findings, said Ballard, best known for his discovery of a certain famous ship: “Titanic shrinks by comparison.”
