page_title: Marine archaeology in the Gulf of Cambay
section_title: Initial discovery
hierarchical_section_title: Marine archaeology in the Gulf of Cambay / Initial discovery
context_page_description: Marine archeology in the Gulf of Khambhat - earlier known as Gulf of Cambay - centers around controversial findings made in December 2000 by the National Institute of Ocean Technology under the Gulf of Khambhat, a bay on the Arabian Sea on the west coast of India. The structures and artifacts discovered by NIOT are the subject of contention. The major disputes surrounding the Gulf of Khambhat Cultural Complex are claims about the existence of submerged city-like structures, the difficulty associating dated artifacts with the site itself, and disputes about whether stone artifacts recovered at the site are actually geofacts or artifacts. One major complaint is that artifacts at the site were recovered by dredging, instead of being recovered during a controlled archeological excavation. This leads archeologists to claim that these artifacts cannot be definitively tied to the site. Because of this problem, prominent archeologists reject a piece of wood that was recovered by dredging and dated to 7500 BC as having any significance in dating the site.
context_section_description: On 19 May 2001, India's Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Science and Technology division, Murli Manohar Joshi, announced that the ruins of an ancient civilization had been discovered off the coast of Gujarat, in the Gulf of Khambhat. The site was discovered by NIOT while they performed routine pollution studies using sonar, and was described as an area of regularly spaced geometric structures. It is located 20 km from the Gujarat coast, spans 9 km, and can be found at a depth of 30–40 meters. In his announcement, Joshi represented the site as an urban settlement that pre-dates the Indus Valley Civilization. Further descriptions of the site by Joshi describe it as containing regularly spaced dwellings, a granary, a bath, a citadel, and a drainage system. However it was later on 22 May, reported that the discovery has not been dated and the discovery (for example, great baths) resembles the Harappan civilization dating 4,000 years ago. Furthermore, the Indus civilization  port Lothal is located at the head, Gulf of Khambhat.
caption: Gulf of Khambhat on the right. Image NASA Earth Observatory
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