Is This a Lost Ancient City?

Archaeologists may have uncovered the location of an ancient Greek city—and the island that it was on.

For more than 400 years, the fate of an ancient Greek city, called Kane, has baffled experts. The city, mentioned in many ancient texts, was on one of a cluster of three islands in the Aegean Sea. These islands were all located off the coast of modern-day Turkey. Two of the islands, now known as the Garip Islands, are still there.

But the third island, an important stopping point on ancient trade routes, no longer appeared on maps made after the 16th century. Until this past November, no one knew why!

Geo-archaeologists—scientists who study ancient landforms—have helped solve the mystery. The island did not disappear, they say. Well, not exactly anyway. New evidence suggests that this former island is now a mainland peninsula. That’s a piece of land that sticks out from a larger land mass and is almost completely surrounded by water. Most of the state of Florida is an example of a peninsula.

How did the island turn into a peninsula? At one time, a channel, a narrow stretch of water between two areas of land, separated the island and mainland. “The original channel was silted up,” Felix Pirson of the German Archaeology Ins

titute, which led the study, told Scholastic News Online. That means the space between the island and mainland was filled with materials carried by running water. That’s how the peninsula formed.

DIGGING DEEPER

To test their theory of what happened to the island, the geo-archaeologists decided to drill into the peninsula. Instead of finding solid ground, they discovered loose soil and rock. To the scientists, this suggests that the land there had formed somewhat recently, perhaps because of earthquakes or the erosion of agricultural fields on the mainland.

The scientists are looking forward to doing further testing. They hope to figure out exactly when the land bridge between the mainland and the island formed. This could provide them with more information about the area during ancient times, they say. “The aim is to reconstruct the ancient environment [to] understand history,” Pirson says.

Scientists use the scientific method to solve lots of mysteries. What was one experiment we did that we use the scientific method?