Science: Drowned Cities

The flap-footed, tank-bearing skindivers have opened a new frontier in archaeology. Last week Piero Nicola Gargallo, 30, a skindiving Italian marquis, was telling how he found the ancient Etruscan seaport of Pyrgi. On the Tyrrhenian coast just north of Rome, the city is known from historical records, but only minor traces have been found on dry land.

Local fishermen guided Gargallo to a reef where they sometimes fished up relics for sale to tourists. One mile offshore, he found weed-grown ruins, chunks of cut marble, and "something that looks like a street or a pier stretching along the bottom for about 100 ft." The ruins are in water 30 ft. to 50 ft. deep, and they cover 20 acres.

Little is known about the Etruscans, a talented, highly civilized people who ruled Rome from about 600 B.C. to 500 B.C. The Etruscan written language has not been deciphered, and even the origin of the people, supposedly in Asia Minor, is known from tradition only. The Romans took over much of their culture but were ostentatiously shocked by their sexual customs, e.g., Etruscans sometimes made love at the dinner table, and young girls earned their dowries by prostitution.

To coordinate the explorations of his skindiving friends, Gargallo has organized the Mediterranean Institute of Underwater Archaeology. In his apartment off Rome's Piazza, di Spagna, he has a map of Italy and Sicily with colored pins indicating the site of 20 to 30 ruins known to his skindivers. There is a big underwater city near Venice. Another, off Mondragone, north of Naples, runs along the bottom for nearly three miles.

Most of these drowned cities are unexplored and unaccounted for. No one knows how their ruins got so deep underwater; the general level of the Mediterranean has risen only a fraction of an inch since glacial times. Gargallo hopes that his underwater ruins may hold the answer to some Etruscan mysteries. "Water," he says, "is destructive, but it can also preserve. Mud gives protection from time, weather and greedy hands. If the sea bottom is undisturbed, some relics last almost indefinitely."