If you haven't read it yet, do (esp.
dispatches No. 9-10/2000). The settlement found by Ballard's
expedition (near the mouth of the River Kizilirmak) has been excellently
preserved in the oxygen-depleted waters of the Black Sea at a depth of over 90
meters. There's a lot of nicely conserved wood there, so that radiocarbon and
dendrochronological dating will be possible. The talk of "Noah's house" is a bit
annoying and too obviously calculated to attract the attention of journalists
and potential sponsors. Still, the discovery looks like the beginning of a new
branch of archaeology.
Then, there are these officialy unconfirmed
rumours of a sequel to the Black Sea Flood story -- the yet unpublished findings
of an Uzbek/Polish team of archaeologists, who suggest that either the
Ryan/Pitman flood culminated in a wave that swept clean a good part of lowland
Central Asia before it withdrew to the present coastline, or there was a
"companion flood" as a huge postglacial lake in W Siberia emptied into N
Kazakhstan, flooding the Steppes.
Piotr