Marine archaeology in the Gulf of Khambhat

[1] The surveys were followed up in the following years and two palaeo channels of old rivers were discovered in the middle of the Khambhat area under 20–40 m (66–131 ft) water depths, at a distance of about 20 km (12 mi) from the present day coast.

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.

[1] Further descriptions of the site by Joshi describe it as containing regularly spaced dwellings, a granary, a bath, a citadel, and a drainage system.

[3] A follow-up investigation was conducted by NIOT in November 2001, which included dredging to recover artifacts and sonar scans to detect structures.

Among the artifacts recovered were a piece of wood, pottery shards, weathered stones initially described as hand tools, fossilized bones, and a tooth.

Artifacts were recovered by means of dredging, including pottery sherds, microliths, wattle and daub remains, and hearth materials.

D. P. Agrawal, chairman of the Paleoclimate Group and founder of Carbon-14 testing facilities in India stated in an article in Frontline Magazine that the piece was dated twice, at separate laboratories.

[4] Part of the controversy is that some of the "shards" are natural geofacts and others lack any proof of any connections, as with the dated pieces of wood, with the purported "ruins" found by NIOT researchers.

In addition, their small size also raises the possibility that the real shards have been transported from elsewhere by local, strong tidal currents.