When fleets of ships carrying warriors from all over Greece set off to do battle with the great fortress city of Troy, perhaps some of them sailed from Pavlopetri, the oldest known submerged town. "It was perfectly situated to have been a major stopover," says Nicholas Flemming, a marine geologist at the University of Southampton, UK, who discovered the settlement when diving in the area in 1967.

Once a busy Bronze Age port, Pavlopetri now sits under 4 metres of water, in a sandy bay in Laconia, near Greece's southern tip. Flemming surveyed the site in 1968, with the help of measuring tapes and a group of students. He discovered an organised grid of streets and courtyards lined with houses of uncut stone, as well as scattered graves and broken pottery that dated from the Mycenaean period, from 1600 to 1100 BC.

There are no signs of docks or harbour structures at Pavlopetri. Instead, researchers think trading vessels, 10 to 20 metres long, would have been anchored in the shallow water of the bay and their cargo unloaded onto horses or perhaps wooden jetties, while warships were dragged up onto the beach.

For 30 years no further work was done at Pavlopetri. But in summer 2009, archaeologist Jon Henderson from the University of Nottingham, UK, working with Elias Spondylis of the Greek government's Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, carried out a detailed digital survey using laser-based positioning and state-of-the-art sonar scanning. They found that the site is much larger than first thought - since 1968, shifting sands have exposed a further 150 square metres of remains. They also uncovered two rock cut tombs, a large ceremonial hall and pottery dating back to at least 2800 BC.

"All this begins to make Pavlopetri much more important than previously thought," says Henderson. "It was maybe one of the main sites in Laconia, with important royals living there." That raises the possibility that the town might have played its part in the adventures immortalised by Homer. "It's quite possible that the people who left for Troy from Laconia, left from this port," says Henderson. "I would love to think it was an important port in Homer's time," agrees Flemming.

Meanwhile, Flemming is studying the coastline to work out exactly how Pavlopetri ended up underwater. The most likely explanation is tectonic activity. The town was abandoned around 1100 BC, but whether it was finished off by several small quakes or one catastrophic event is still an open question.

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