Scholars face threats for challenging an archaeological claim that has sparked national pride in a war-torn land
The jeep pulls to a halt, its tires sinking into the slippery mud track that leads up a ridge overlooking this modest town in central Bosnia. To the right, the scrubby land drops precipitously to the valley floor, 300 feet below. To the left, the shelled-out remains of farmhouses are scattered across hills that were a front line during Bosnia’s civil war from 1992 to 1995. On either side of the road, red signs marked with skull and crossbones warn of the presence of land mines.
The driver engages the four-wheel drive and the jeep lurches up the hill, fishtailing gently through the sun-thawed muck, its once-white hood pointed toward the summit of Pljesevica, a roughly pyramid-shaped hill that towers 375 feet above the valley.
A few minutes later, Sanel Silajdzic hops out of the passenger seat and charges to the summit, dismissing the minefield signs with a wave of his hand. He stops at a makeshift plastic tent protecting an archaeological dig site. Inside, a living-room-sized section of the hilltop has been excavated, revealing what appears to be a stone-tile floor and a shallow well.
“This is it,” he says excitedly. “You are standing on the top of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Moon.”
Mr. Silajdzic’s employer says the trees, scrub, and soil on this hilltop conceal a man-made step pyramid, similar to those constructed by the Maya but far larger and older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt. It is one of five pyramids that Semir Osmanagic, a Bosnian-American metal-shop owner in Houston and self-described “alternative historian,” believes he has discovered in Visoko. The largest, the 720-foot-tall Pyramid of the Sun, stands on the opposite side of the valley, masquerading as Visocica Hill. They all are some 12,000 years old, he says, the product of an advanced civilization that has gone undetected or unrecognized by established historians and archaeologists.
“This is the greatest construction complex ever built on the face of the earth,” says Mr. Osmanagic, whose penchant for wide-brimmed hats makes him look like a Bosnian Indiana Jones. “All of a sudden there is a need to rewrite world history, and that makes some people quite nervous.”
Some scholars are indeed nervous. In a nation deeply scarred and traumatized by a genocidal war, Mr. Osmanagic’s sensational claims have been embraced by senior Bosnian politicians, publicized in the news media in Sarajevo, the capital, as well as internationally, and accepted by hundreds of thousands of Bosnians. In their view, the pyramids reveal a glorious Bosnian past, and promise to be a magnet for tourists to come.
Mr. Osmanagic’s critics dismiss his theory. The hills are just hills, they say, although one of them does boast the ruins of a medieval castle. And they are fighting to deny him any credibility.
“It is not possible that those are pyramids,” says Mark Rose, of the Archaeological Institute of America, who organized a petition asking Unesco, the United Nations’ education-and-science agency, not to send a proposed expedition to the site. “Every major media outlet that initially covered this story got it wrong. It’s clearly crackpot stuff, but apparently nobody bothered to check the story.”
Others worry that Mr. Osmanagic’s theory is siphoning resources away from devastated Bosnian institutions still in desperate need.
“When the war began, our institutions were ruined, our scientists all left or died, and after the war nobody resumed support for research,” says Salmedin Mesihovic, a history lecturer at the University of Sarajevo. “The money that is needed for our universities, institutes, and the National Museum — that money is going to Visoko instead.”
But as pyramid mania has grown, spread by credulous accounts, those who have expressed skepticism have been savaged in the Bosnian news media, deluged with hate mail, even labeled traitors to their nation. Many observers now see the debate in stark terms: Will a pseudoscientific project, even one that serves to restore Bosnia’s wounded pride and dignity, win out over peer-reviewed archaeological research?
Pyramid Hunter
In the spring of 2005, Mr. Osmanagic returned to his homeland to attend Sarajevo’s International Book Fair. On the eve of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, in 1991, he had emigrated to Houston, where he started a successful metalworking shop and took up writing books with alternative versions of ancient history. He hoped to promote his books in his native country.
Mr. Osmanagic has a degree from the University of Sarajevo in economics and politics; and is working on a Ph.D. in political science — comparing the spiritual beliefs and technological accomplishments of the ancient Maya and their European contemporaries — at the university, according to his adviser, Hidajet Repovac.
At the invitation of the director of Visoko’s local museum, he visited the town and was taken to the top of Visocica, now dubbed the Pyramid of the Sun.
“The first time I saw those hills, as they call them, I could see that they were perfectly pyramid-shaped, with sides perfectly aligned to the cardinal points of the compass,” recalls Mr. Osmanagic, a gregarious, charismatic 47-year-old whose boyish enthusiasm at the prospect of Bosnian pyramids stays at a constant high pitch. “I’ve seen more than 200 pyramids all over the world, and it sharpens the senses. I knew immediately that these were not natural hills but man-made objects.”
He already had more than a passing interest in pyramids, having traveled in Central and South America to visit Inca, Aztec, Olmec, and especially classical Maya ruins. Some of his books on ancient civilizations have been translated into English.
The books offer a New Age interpretation of the Maya and other ancient pyramid builders. In World of the Maya (which can be read online at http://www.alternativna historija.com/WMmain.htm), Mr. Osmanagic writes that in 2012, when a 26,000-year cycle in the Maya calendar is completed, “we will again be enlightened with bundles of energy,” which “could bring about a positive turnaround for our civilization.” The ancient Maya are described as descendants of “the civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria [who] erected the first temples on energy potent point[s] of the planet ... to serve as a gateway to other worlds and dimensions.”
Mr. Mesihovic, the history lecturer, who has read Mr. Osmanagic’s Bosnian-language works, says they contain even more-unorthodox opinions: that Hitler may have survived World War II and is in exile in Antarctica, and that the builders of the Bosnian pyramids came from the mythical ancient civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria and have made contact with the planets of Sirius-B system with the help of a star gate.
“There is everything in there from reincarnation to space aliens,” says Mr. Mesihovic. “I think it is sort of a New Age religion with some kind of supernatural basis.”
After his epiphany on Visocica Hill, Mr. Osmanagic received permission from the municipality of Visoko and the Zenica-Doboj Canton to dig there. He also set up a nonprofit organization to raise money and to conduct and promote the digs. He named it the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation.
He was encouraged by his early investigations. Core samples on the west side of Visocica suggested the possibility of artificial construction. According to his measurements, the faces of the pyramids are oriented to the four cardinal points of the compass, and three of them, the pyramids of the Sun, Moon, and Dragon, as he named them, are reckoned to form a perfect equilateral triangle. Mr. Osmanagic promptly wrote and published a book, The Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun, outlining his theory and released it in an October 2005 news conference in Sarajevo.
“If I had gone to professional archaeologists or the museums and said, ‘Hey, guys, I found pyramids in Bosnia,’ they would laugh at me,” he says of his decision to bypass peer-reviewed journals.
“There are a lot of opponents in scientific circles who are really against what we do,” he says, “for the simple reason that their picture of the world, their history, will have to be changed. For decades science has been mostly conducted by the elite, whereas with us, people can come and see what we find the very next day in the news media, which is why we have such huge public support.”
Mania and Intimidation
The news-media campaign opened by Mr. Osmanagic was effective. By the time digging got under way, in the spring of 2006, Bosnia was gripped with pyramid fever.
Federation Television, the largest Sarajevo-based network, provided extensive coverage, and soon thousands of people were visiting Visoko every day. Thousands more volunteered to help with the dig. A local hotel renamed itself after the Pyramid of the Sun. Souvenir shops stocked “Pharaoh Osmanagic” T-shirts and pyramid-themed knickknacks. Restaurants began selling pyramid-shaped pizzas. For a town that had been heavily damaged in the war — its leather and chocolate factories were destroyed by Serb shells — this was a dream come true.
“Local citizens are very happy about the pyramid dig because it has brought economic activity and made the town live again,” says Munib Alibegovic, mayor of Visoko, which has about 12,000 residents. “Tourists are coming in very big numbers, and we are trying to organize to handle them on a much greater level.”
The pyramid story has particular resonance for ethnic Bosniaks, the people previously known as Bosnian Muslims, who constitute about 55 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s population. To them, Visocica is not just any hill but the seat of Bosnia’s medieval kings, whose castle lies ruined on the summit. Visoko itself was Bosnia’s medieval capital, remained in Bosniak hands during the civil war of the 1990s, and remains a stronghold of their nationalist party, the Party for Democratic Action.
Some Bosnian scholars have spoken out against the pyramid project. Twenty-one of them signed an open letter published in newspapers in April 2006 that criticized it as pseudoscience. Bosniak nationalists responded with fury, and many of the petition’s signatories were intimidated into silence.
One of the leading critics of the theory, Zilka Kujundzic-Vejzagic, of the National Museum in Sarajevo, did not respond to repeated telephone and e-mail requests from The Chronicle for comment. (When a reporter asked after her at the museum, he was told that she was in Canada, although several scholars said they knew her to be in town.)
“The atmosphere was very, very ugly, with a lot of threats to the experts and very nasty articles in the newspapers and the Internet,” says a Bosnian scholar living abroad, who asked for anonymity. “There was a fear that if you kept criticizing Osmanagic, your institution’s funding might be cut.”
Such concerns were compounded when Sulejman Tihic, a Bosniak who was chairman of the nation’s three-member presidency, threw his weight behind the project. “One does not need to be a big expert to see that those are the remains of three pyramids,” he told journalists at a June 2006 summit of Balkan presidents, adding that there are at least six pyramids in Bosnia. He urged other heads of state to visit Visocica and asked Unesco’s director general, Koïchiro Matsuura, to send a team to evaluate its importance.
The attempt to lobby Unesco was too much for Anthony Harding, a professor of archaeology at the University of Exeter, in England, and president of the European Association of Archaeologists, who was one of 26 scholars who signed an open letter in June urging the U.N. agency not to undertake such a mission. To do so, the letter said, would bestow credibility on “a pseudoarchaeological project.”
“My concern has always been to support the professional archaeologists of Bosnia who are being dragged through the dirt simply because they espouse normal scientific principles of inquiry,” says Mr. Harding, who spent a few hours in at Visocica in 2006. “Because they don’t support this idea of a glorious Bosnian past, they are suffering. It is intolerable that real science is being starved of resources and, to add insult to injury, they are being told they are traitors and that sort of thing.”
Unesco does not intend to send a mission to Visoko, says Mechtild Rossler, of the organization’s World Heritage Center, in Paris. President Tihic’s request has not been followed up with the appropriate documentation, nor was Visoko on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s official submission of sites for the center’s list of places of “outstanding universal value.”
She is aware of the pseudoscientific nature of Mr. Osmanagic’s project, she says, and shares scholars’ concerns that a Unesco mission might be used to enhance its legitimacy. “We have a standing invitation to go to Visoko,” says Ms. Rossler, “but we are very cautious.”
The letter has not discouraged a cavalcade of area luminaries, bearing invitations from Mr. Osmanagic’s foundation, from making pilgrimages to the dig site. Pursued by camera crews, several made encouraging comments, which quickly made their way into the foundation’s promotional materials.
“I don’t believe all this was created by nature,” said Christian Schwarz-Schilling, a German politician who holds the title of high representative — in effect, international pro-consul — of Bosnia under the terms of the treaty that ended the war, in 1995. “Those academics that claim the opposite and dismiss Mr. Osmanagic’s claims, they must come here and prove the opposite.”
Even the country’s senior Muslim cleric, Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric, has urged followers to pray that pyramids would be discovered.
Ignoring Skeptics
What evidence have the pyramid supporters uncovered to back their claims? Mr. Silajdzic, the foundation’s guide, takes a reporter midway up the north face of the Pyramid of the Sun to share what has been found.
He stands on a long slab of composite rock that a team of volunteers excavated during the most recent field season, last summer and fall. Other vaguely block-like slabs lie beside and under it.
Taken together, a lay observer could imagine them to have once been part of an engineered structure. On the other hand, they also look like they could be the fractured, weathered remains of a very large sheet of natural composite.
“These are monumental concrete blocks that were made here on the site,” says Mr. Silajdzic, a gracious and enthusiastic host who is nearing a degree in history at the University of Sarajevo. “The blocks are always of similar size, and you can see that they are cut at 90 degrees. Nature cannot do this, not to a thousand blocks!”
Farther up the hill, an excavation has revealed a deep, uniform fissure, showing more layers of composite rocks. On the other side of the valley, excavations at the base of the Pyramid of the Moon have uncovered what looks to be a path of uniform stone tiles. With the help of a backhoe, the adjacent hillside has been excavated to suggest the steps of a large pyramid, with layers of sedimentary rock creating an arresting visual effect.
“These are obviously man-made structures,” Mr. Osmanagic says of the tiles and monumental blocks. “Geologists cannot explain them.”
Outside experts strongly disagree. Robert M. Schoch, an associate professor of natural science at Boston University who earned a doctorate in geology at Yale University, is in that camp. Mr. Schoch, whose own view that the Great Sphinx is thousands of years older than generally thought has made him controversial in academic circles, spent 10 days in Visoko last summer. “The only thing that’s missing is that there is nothing real there,” he says.
What look like tiles and monumental blocks are both part of the same geological process, he explains. Six million or seven million years ago, lakes and rivers covered the area. Sediments accumulated in the lake and river bottoms, forming flat layers of silt, mud, and sand, all of which eventually turned to stone. Those on the north face of Visocica — the monumental blocks — are composed of coarse particles with embedded rocks and pebbles; those at Pljesevica are sandstone. They were probably once near the mouth of a river, marked as they are with ripple marks and the fossilized imprints of leaves that had settled on the bottom.
Later, Mr. Schoch continues, the great flat plates were shattered by tectonic movements, accounting for the appearance of both tiles and building blocks. (Larger movements created the pyramidal hills themselves, forcing portions of the lake beds upward, he says.) “It was actually textbook geology,” he says. “I would love to take my students there.”
That is unlikely to happen, however. Mr. Schoch left Visoko last year fearing for his life. As he tells it, as his hosts came to realize that he was not going to endorse their views, the atmosphere became increasingly uncomfortable.
“Our driver and local guides had been in the army and killed people,” he says. “I don’t want to say that anyone was going to put a knife to my back, but I was concerned for my physical safety. They weren’t just cold and grim-looking — I would say there were veiled threats. ... When our plane took off, I was very glad to be out of there.”
Mr. Schoch adds that Mr. Osmanagic himself was open and accommodating, particularly early in the trip, and appears to truly believe there are pyramids under Visoko’s hills, even when presented with evidence to the contrary.
Aly A. Barakat, a geologist from the Egyptian Mineral Resources Authority, arrived in Visoko from Cairo later last summer. He spent 45 days there and reached conclusions similar to Mr. Schoch’s about the blocks and tiles. Mr. Osmanagic’s digging “exposed blades of sandstone, and they are natural, completely natural,” says Mr. Barakat, who was sent to Visoko by the Egyptian government in response to a diplomatic request from Sarajevo.
(While Mr. Barakat does not believe that there are any constructed pyramids at Visoko, he thinks that the hills at Visocica may have been reshaped by humans in the Roman or medieval periods.)
Mr. Schoch and Mr. Barakat also separately measured the hills and concluded that they were neither perfectly aligned to the compass points nor spaced equally far apart, as Mr. Osmanagic says they are. A network of tunnels under the town of Visoko did not appear to Mr. Schoch to have any obvious connection to the pyramids nor to contain evidence of ancient construction, as Mr. Osmanagic maintains.
Harmless Pyramid Scheme?
Mr. Osmanagic says he is open to criticism but does not understand why scholars have signed petitions to stop him from digging. “If you think that the pyramids don’t exist, why wouldn’t you say, ‘Let him dig. He will find nothing’?” he asks. “This is something new and encouraging for Bosnia, which has had a lot of negative things happen to it.”
That reasoning is widespread in Sarajevo.
“The only way we will know what is there is to dig, so let them dig,” Haris Silajdzic, current Bosniak member of the nation’s rotating presidency, told The Chronicle. “These enthusiasts are getting people excited and interested in something positive and are helping the economy of a poor part of the country.”
“It has noticeably improved the lives of thousands of people, and if they really find something, it will produce a touristic boom for Sarajevo,” says Senad Slatina, a political analyst in Sarajevo. “I really hope this miracle will happen.”
A spokesman for the German politician, Mr. Schwarz-Schilling, Chris Bennett, calls it “the world’s first victimless pyramid scheme.”
But skeptics see plenty of victims. “It’s draining resources away from legitimate things — not just research excavations, but maintaining museum collections and structures,” says Mr. Rose, of the Archaeological Institute of America. “There are only so many dollars for archaeology, and money is going to a project that has no basis in reality.”
The National Museum, in Sarajevo, which goes unheated all winter, has had to close its archaeological wing because the museum cannot afford to repair the roof, which collapsed twice last winter. The National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a 19th-century structure gutted by Serbian incendiary rounds during the siege of the capital, remains an empty shell 12 years after the end of the war.
By contrast, last year the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation has raised about $500,000 in money and in-kind support, according to its director, Mario Gerussi. The Bosnian government is said to have provided a small portion of those resources; additional amounts have come from state-owned companies. Private individuals in Malaysia have been major donors, providing $220,000 so far. When Mr. Osmanagic visited Kuala Lumpur, the capital, in December, he was received by the former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, a wartime ally of the Bosniaks, who has twice visited the Visoko digs.
This year, Mr. Gerussi says, the foundation must raise a minimum of $1-million to expand the digs to all five sites. Mr. Osmanagic hopes to get $200,000 from the Bosnian government.
“This should not be a top priority,” says Ahmed Khattab, who is Egypt’s new ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina. “This digging will require millions and millions, and meanwhile artifacts are being damaged in the museums for lack of heat. Bosnia is a poor country, and there have to be different priorities.”
There is also concern that in his quest to unearth pyramids, Mr. Osmanagic may be damaging heretofore undiscovered Neolithic, Roman, and medieval artifacts.
“They are damaging real sites,” says Vuk Bacanovic, a graduate student in ancient history at the University of Sarajevo and host of a radio show, on which he has tried to debunk the foundation’s claims. He points to human remains, a flint tool, and other finds that Mr. Osmanagic’s foundation has reported unearthing. “There are artifacts all over the Visoko valley,” says Mr. Bacanovic, “and he’s got a large excavator digging into the hills.”
“It’s the heritage of Bosnia that’s being destroyed,” says Garrett G. Fagan, an associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, who likens the foundation’s activity to bulldozing Stonehenge to look for secret chambers underneath. “Once a site has been dug, it can’t be redug.”
Mr. Osmanagic denies that his digs are endangering Bosnia’s heritage. He notes that he has the necessary permits, and that his organization “is repeatedly inviting people from official institutions to come join us.”
“We are not destroying medieval sites, and anyone can prove that for themselves by visiting,” he says. A reporter’s visit to the site confirmed that there was no digging within the only officially protected area, around the medieval castle atop Visocica.
Elma Kovacevic, international-relations coordinator of the Pyramid of the Sun Foundation and an adviser to a Bosnian foreign-trade-promotion group, bristles at the critics from abroad: “I never heard the voice of a single one of these archaeologists during the war when other sites were being destroyed and damaged. Now, when we have a chance for the future, they are trying to fight against us.”
“I love this country, I stayed during the war, and I want to see this country more developed,” she says. “We deserve it. We don’t need more armies. We need experts, people to fight a war for the truth of the pyramids.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 53, Issue 30, Page A12
