The breathtaking panorama of the Umiam Lake sure captures the attention of passersby but beneath this water body lies a hidden treasure – a forgotten and sunken prehistoric settlement.
The Khasi Hills is known for its numerous archaeological sites and the most widely known among these is the prehistoric settlement at Lawnongthroh also known as the ridge (or Budlum in Khasi) of U Lum Sohpet Bneng or the Umbilical Peak, close to the Umiam Lake.
Umiam was a river before it was turned into a reservoir. The dam was built in the early 1960s, thereby submerging most of the places located along the river bank. Before that, the river bank served as a perfect location for settlement and agricultural activities.
On May 17, when the water level of the lake reached its lowest ever exposing the submerged road (known as the old road), archaeologist Dr. Marco Mitri made a startling discovery – remnants of human activities and tools lying on the now-dry grounds, more like a submerged prehistoric settlement.
One of these exposed remnants was a monolith. Standing tall, the monolith, which is synonymous with the Khasis, was surrounded by many small stone tools, including several eroded and scattered burial cists.
Some of these were clearly exposed in the sections of eroded layers of the natural embankment at the edge of the lake. The Umiam Valley is located on the western flank and very close to the Sohpet Bneng Hill.
A recent survey on the newly discovered Neolithic site at Umiam Lake offers the space for close examination of the site, both in its extent and cultural implication for the Neolithic culture of the Khasi Hills.
The discovery is a reminder of the lost city of Zakhiku – an archaeological site discovered during low water level in the reservoir of the Mosul Dam in the Nineveh Governorate, part of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, in 2013. This city was destroyed by an earthquake around 1350 BC.
According to Mitri, this site was the citadel of prehistoric settlement as it is not very far from the archaeological sites at Lawnongthroh and Myrkhan, where Stone Age tools were discovered in 2004 and 2013, respectively. Tools from these two sites date back to 1200 BC and 1900 BC, respectively.
Aside from the site where the monolith was discovered, Mitri said that a factory site has also been spotted at the foothill of U Lum Diengiei on the western corner of the lake.
“A large number of tools were recovered from this spot, but most of them have been artificially moved from their original context and exposed to the surface, probably due to cultivation by the local farmers in the past,” he said.
He claimed to have discovered a site where iron smelting was done, as evident from the iron slag beneath the lake.
Evidence of the stone tools – both finished and the unfurnished, are still scattered along the banks of the lake. The context of these stratified tools is, however, not very clear.
“The tools which were recovered from the factory site at the foothill of Lum Diengiei were composed mostly of rough, unfinished, and broken pieces and all of them bear large amounts of flake scars on their surface,” Mitri said.
He said that some of the finished tools were recovered from the exposed bed and their surfaces are heavily rolled by the seasonal impact of the water from the lake. “At this stage, no effort has been made to classify the types and characteristic features of the tools,” he added.
Convinced that this place was home to a prehistoric settlement, Mitri said the Umiam site can be functionally designated as a factory site, although traces of other activities are evident around it.
“More concentrated effort is needed to get detailed knowledge of the site, especially in the context of understanding its spatial dimension and its functional processes,” he added.