Historian: Plato, writing in the fourth century B.C., describes an island he calls Atlantis, where an ancient civilization, famous for pottery made from clay of an unusual shade of red, flourished before being destroyed by volcanic eruptions. It has traditionally been held that Atlantis is entirely a creation of Plato's imagination. However, archaeologists now believe that volcanic eruptions destroyed a civilization on a Greek island today called Santorini roughly when Plato's Atlantis was supposedly destroyed. And because Santorini also has unusual red clay deposits, some scholars now contend that Santorini was Plato's Atlantis. Yet the fact remains that writers before Plato never mention an Atlantis-like civilization. Since they would certainly have done so if such a civilization had existed, the traditional view is surely correct.