Ibimvi: Underwater Construction

Utility

The sands of Irewa could get particularly hot, especially as the sunlight reflected off the beach and the sands. Underwater housing allowed citizens to live and sleep in cooler environments. That said, the discovered underground buildings were never large enough to support more than a small family, so these buildings were likely not meant for social gatherings. They would have to cool themselves off by other means.

Manufacturing

Houses were built of local stone (as they were never meant to float). Tar was used both to seal the stones and to fuse the tubing and pipe works to the structures. There is no current understanding as to how the total structure made it to the shores and then into the waters, but it is believed that cylindrical tree trunks played some role in carting the vehicle. These were rare on Irewa or the neighboring provinces, so they might have needed to be imported from the Werai empires or Yukur.

Complexity

There is a head-sized hole in one corner of the ceiling of each structure, which ensured that oxygen was completely replaced with carbon dioxide over the course of the resident's stay. The floor of the room has a singular hole at the bottom and is generally rigid. Some archaeologists believe that the house was constructed on dry land, then submerged into the water as a collective effort. The holes that lead into the housing were lined with a rigid tubing, a fairly advanced technology all to its own, that allowed dwellers to crawl out of their buildings onto dry land.

Discovery

At first, it wasn't apparent that the Irewai Empire knew how to build and maintain underwater construction. Most if not all of the buildings found on the shoreline were underground. The theory at the time was that the pyroclastic flow wiped out the buildings above ground, which would have been constructed more poorly than the buildings at the capital. It was later discovered that in fact the volcanic ash had moved the coastline of Irewa outward by several dozen cubits. The buildings that were now underground were once underwater. Sadly, this meant that archeologists couldn't see the technology in action, merely hypothesize about its capabilities.