‘The oldest pyramid in the world’ in Indonesia? An investigation leads to skepticism
In a mountainous corner of Indonesia lies a hill dotted with stone terraces where people from all over the country come to conduct Islamic and Hindu rituals. Some say the place has a mystical aura, or even that it may hold a hidden treasure.
The partially excavated site, Gunung Padang, is a relaxing place to spend an afternoon. It is also at the center of a raging debate.
Archaeologists say the hill is a dormant volcano and ceramics recovered so far indicate people have been using the site for hundreds of years or more. But some Indonesians, including an earthquake geologist and a president who left office in 2014, have suggested the site may have been built much earlier by an undiscovered ancient civilization. Their story has been spreading within the country for more than a decade, but not far beyond – until recently.
There will be a Netflix documentary series in 2022: “Ancient Apocalypse,‘ used the geologist’s research for an episode about Gunung Padang. And in October, the geologist published an article in an international scientific journal that has sparked controversy an international dispute on questions of science, ethics and ancient history.
Archaeologists say the study’s most controversial conclusion – that Gunung Padang may be ‘the oldest pyramid in the world’ because its deepest layer appears to have been ‘sculpted’ by humans up to 27,000 years ago – is problematic because it is not based on physical proof. . Indonesia had no history of pyramid building, they say, and people in the Paleolithic era, which ended more than 10,000 years ago, could not have built pyramids. (The pyramids of Giza in Egypt are only about 4,500 years old.)
The New Jersey-based publisher of the study says it is now conducting an internal investigation, meaning the journal is “exploring concerns shared by the archaeological community.” Several archaeologists have publicly expressed their concerns, saying the research “not worthy of publication‘ and that the geologist’s claim that the hill was built by men ‘just doesn’t make sense.”
In response, the study’s lead author, earthquake geologist Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, says this has been misunderstood. His supporters include Graham Hancock, the British journalist who starred in the Netflix series and has done so argued – to his own critics – that archaeologists should be more open to theories that challenge academic orthodoxy.
“This judge-jury-and-executioner model of archaeology, where they can define what is and what is not evidence – what is and is not acceptable as evidence – is not helpful to the advancement of human knowledge in the long run.,” Mr. Hancock said in a telephone interview.
Gold on that hill?
Gunung Padang is located near the city of Bandung on Java, the most populous island in Indonesia. The excavations began in the early 1980s, said Lutfi Yondri, an archaeologist with the Bandung provincial government.
Young Indonesians inspired by quixotic attempts to discover lost pyramids in Bosnia later promoted the idea that pointed mounds could hide lost pyramids, Mr. Lutfi said. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s staff organized forums to investigate that question, as well as unproven speculation that Gunung Padang might contain hidden treasures.
Archaeologists have retreated from the start. But Yudhoyono’s government continued to fund excavation work at Gunung Padang, and he said after a visit in 2014, near the end of his 10-year term, that it could be “the largest prehistoric building in the world.”
The pyramid story “has a nationalistic flavor, and is supported by a former president,” said Noel Hidalgo Tan, an archaeologist at the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Archeology and Fine Arts in Bangkok.
“That’s why it’s a myth that refuses to die,” he said.
Mr. Yudhoyono’s aide referred questions to Andi Arief, who once organized forums on Gunung Padang as a member of the president’s staff. Mr. Arief responded to a question, but did not make himself available for an interview.
Science or illusion?
Mr Natawidjaja, the geologist who led the investigation in October, said he started investigating the site in 2011. At the time, he was studying an active fault in the area and noticed that Gunung Padang’s pointed shape made it stand out in a landscape of eroded slopes.
President Joko Widodo cut funding for the study after coming to power in 2014. Mr Natawidjaja later published his findings in a recent edition of Archaeological prospecting. The methods and principles of the research are the same ones he would use to analyze earthquakes, he said in a Zoom interview.
“I’m just changing the topic from active errors to pyramids,” he said.
Several archaeologists said that the main problem of the research is that the human presence in Gunung Padang has been dated based on radiocarbon measurements from soil derived from drilling samples – not from artefacts recovered from the site.
“The lesson is that radiocarbon dating is not magic, and there are important caveats to its interpretation,” says archaeologist Rebecca Bradley. wrote in a 2016 critique of Mr. Natawidjaja’s preliminary findings. (She said in an email that his recently published research struck her as “a more organized recap of the same old stuff.”)
Mr Tan, the Bangkok archaeologist, described the study’s attempt to link the age of soils to human activity as the “biggest logical fallacy.” The age of the soil is not surprising because soil accumulates over time and deeper layers are often older, he added. “But it is not the land that is tied to construction activities. It is not soil attached to a fire pit, for example, or soil attached to a burial.”
“It’s just dirt,” he said.
Ceramics and other evidence from the upper layers of Gunung Padang indicate that people were there as early as the 12th or 13th century and that they built structures atop natural rock formations, said Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz, an archaeologist who has done research in Indonesia. .
“People may have been there before, but so far they haven’t left anything that we can date,” says Professor Tjoa-Bonatz, who teaches at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Harry Truman Simanjuntak, an Indonesian archaeologist, said he also considered the study’s pyramid claim to be unfounded.
“There are always scientists who are illusionists and practice pseudoscience, seeking knowledge that is not based on data,” he said.
In research
The internal research of the Archaeological Prospection article was confirmed by Wiley, the journal’s publisher. Eileen G. Ernenwein, co-editor of the magazine, declined an interview request.
In an email, Mr Natawidjaja defended his work and said the study was “a matter of scientific disagreement”. Soil samples were legitimate evidence for assessing human involvement in Gunung Padang, he added, partly because the soil used by ancient builders was used to enclose human-built structures.
“The rigorous peer-reviewed publication process of our findings in a reputable journal underlines the scientific validity and merit of our work,” he wrote.
Mr Hancock, who described himself in ‘Ancient Apocalypse’ as ‘archaeologists’ enemy No. 1′, said the program had certainly contributed to the level of ‘name-calling and attacks’ Mr Natawidjaja now faces during the investigation.
In 2022, the Society for American Archaeology said in an open letter against Netflix and the show’s production company, ITN, that the series “devalues the archaeological profession on the basis of false claims and disinformation” – an argument strongly cited by Mr Hancock refuted. Netflix and ITN declined to comment for this article.
Mr Hancock has argued that archaeologists should not dismiss the potential existence of lost ancient civilizations, partly because so much land was underwater during the last ice age. ended about 11,700 years ago.
“To say that not enough work has been done, more work needs to be done to resolve this issue – that’s fair enough,” Mr Hancock said of the recent inquiry. “But to bungle the whole thing from the start and say this is a prosperous claim that flies in the face of everything we know about the past? That’s not helpful.”
On a recent afternoon in Gunung Padang, site administrators said Mr. Natawidjaja’s research supports what their ancestors have always said: that the site is the handiwork of an ancient civilization. Some people have reported seeing mysterious visions of prehistoric figures there, she added.
“We are convinced that this is man-made and not natural,” said one of the caretakers, Zenal Arifin, over a cup of sweetened coffee near the site’s information center.
President Joko’s government remains largely, but not entirely, out of the fighting.
Hilmar Farid, director-general of culture at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology, said the ministry was not involved in debates about Gunung Padang’s age. But he also said the latest research on the site is “apparently inadequate to support the theory that this is a man-made pyramid.”
“From the perspective of someone like me who has to mobilize resources to support certain activities,” he said, “this is certainly the last priority.”