In a mountainous corner of Indonesia is a hill, dotted with stone terraces, where people come from all over the country to perform Islamic and Hindu rituals. Some say the site has a mystical air, or even that it may hold buried 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 that the pottery recovered there so far suggests that people have been using the site for several hundred years or more. However, 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 as-yet-undiscovered ancient civilization. Their narrative has spread for more than a decade in the country, but not much beyond — until recently.
In 2022, a Netflix documentary series, “Ancient Apocalypse,” was based on the geologist’s research for an episode about Gunung Padang. And in October, the geologist published an article in an international scientific journal that he fed 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 “carved” by humans up to 27,000 years ago — is problematic because it is not based on natural elements. . Indonesia had no history of building pyramids, they say, and people in the Stone Age, 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 “addressing concerns shared by the archaeological community.” Several archaeologists have voiced their concerns publicly, saying the study is “not worth publishing“and that the geologist’s claim that the hill was built by men”it just doesn’t make sense.”
In response, the study’s lead author, earthquake geologist Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, says it has been misunderstood. His supporters include Graham Hancock, the British journalist who starred in the Netflix series and has he argued – to him their own critics — that archaeologists should be more open to theories that challenge academic orthodoxy.
“This judge-jury-and-executor model of archeology where they can define what is and is not evidence—what is and is not admissible as evidence—is not helpful in the long run for the advancement of human knowledge», Mr. Hancock said in a telephone interview.
Gold on this hill?
Gunung Padang is located near the city of Bandung in Java, Indonesia’s most populous island. Excavations began in the early 1980s, said Lutfi Yondri, an archaeologist for the Bandung provincial government.
Young Indonesians, inspired by quixotic efforts to discover lost pyramids in Bosnia, later promoted the idea that the pointed hills could hide lost pyramids, Mr Lutfi said. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s staff organized forums to investigate this question, as well as unproven speculation that Gunung Padang may contain buried treasure.
Archaeologists pushed back from the start. But Mr Yudhoyono’s administration continued to fund excavation work at Gunung Padang and said after his visit in 2014, near the end of his 10-year tenure, that it could be “the largest prehistoric building in the world”.
The pyramid narrative “has some nationalist edge and is supported by a former president,” said Noel Hidalgo Tan, an archaeologist at the Regional Center for Archeology and Fine Arts of Southeast Asia 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 a forum on Gunung Padang as a member of the president’s staff. Mr. Arief responded to an inquiry but did not make himself available for an interview.
Science or illusion?
Mr Natawidjaja, the geologist who led the October study, said he began 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 eroded slopes.
President Joko Widodo cut off funding for the research after taking office in 2014. Mr Natawidjaja later published his findings in a recent edition of Archaeological Search. The study’s methods and principles are the same he would use to analyze earthquakes, he said in a Zoom interview.
“I’m just changing the subject from active rifts to pyramids,” he said.
Several archaeologists said the main problem with the study is that it dated the human presence at Gunung Padang based on radiocarbon measurements of the soil from drill samples – not the artifacts recovered from the site.
“The lesson is that radiocarbon dates are not magic and have significant caveats about their interpretation,” archaeologist Rebecca Bradley. He wrote in a 2016 review of Mr. Natawidjaja’s preliminary findings. (She said in an email that the newly published study struck her as “a more organized recap of the same old stuff.”)
Mr Tan, the archaeologist in Bangkok, described the study’s attempt to link the age of the soil to human activity as the “biggest logical fallacy”. The age of the soil is not surprising because soil accumulates over time and deeper layers tend to be older, he added. “But it is not the land that is associated with construction activity. It is not soil that is tied up, say, in a fire pit, or soil that is tied up in 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 on top of natural rock formations, said Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz, an archaeologist who has conducted research in Indonesia. .
“There could have been some people in the past, but they haven’t left anything that we can date, so far,” said Professor Tjoa-Bonatz, who teaches at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Harry Truman Simanjudak, an Indonesian archaeologist, said he also found the study’s pyramid claim unfounded.
“There are always scientists who are illusionists and practice pseudoscience, seeking knowledge that is not based on data,” he said.
Under investigation
Archaeological Prospection’s internal research was confirmed by Wiley, the journal’s publisher. Eileen G. Ernenwein, co-editor of the journal, declined an interview request.
In an email, Mr Natawidjaja defended his work and said the research involved “a matter of scientific disagreement”. The soil samples were legitimate evidence to assess human involvement at Gunung Padang, he added, in part because the soil used by the ancient builders was used to surround man-made structures.
“The rigorous process of publishing our findings in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal underscores the scientific validity and value of our work,” he wrote.
Mr Hancock, who described himself in “Ancient Apocalypse” as “enemy No. 1 of archaeologists”, said the program had certainly contributed to the level of “exaggeration and attack” Mr Natawidjaja now faced over the study .
In 2022, the Society for American Archaeology he said in an open letter to Netflix and the series’ production company, ITN, that the series “discredits the archaeological profession based on false claims and misinformation” — an argument Mr Hancock strongly argued was denied. Netflix and ITN declined to comment for this article.
Mr Hancock has argued that archaeologists should not dismiss the possible existence of lost ancient civilizations, in part because so much land was submerged when the last ice age ended about 11,700 years ago.
“To say that not enough work has been done yet, more work is needed to settle this issue — that’s fair enough,” Mr. Hancock said of the recent study. “But to essentially screw up the whole thing from the ground up and say this is an absurd claim that goes against everything we know about the past? This is not helpful.”
On a recent afternoon at Gunung Padang, caretakers of the site said Mr. Natawidjaja’s research supports what their ancestors have always said: that the site is the work of an ancient civilization. Some people have reported seeing mysterious visions of prehistoric figures there, they added.
“We are sure this is man-made, not natural,” said one of the caretakers, Zenal Arifin, sipping a cup of sugary coffee near the site’s information center.
President Joko’s administration is mostly, but not entirely, out of the fray.
Hilmar Farid, director general of culture at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology, said the ministry was not involved in discussions about the age of Gunung Padang. But he also said the latest research on the site is “apparently insufficient 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, “that’s definitely the last priority.”