Pyramid Scheme :: Mile Zero

June 30, 2006

Pyramid Scheme

Beth Kampschror writes in the July/August '06 Archeology:

Driving to the top of the pointy hill that looms above Visoko, some 20 miles northwest of Sarajevo, is a bit of a hassle these days. A brown sign points the way to the medieval ruins that cap its peak, and our car crawls up the winding mountain road, dodging considerable traffic. Halfway up, a uniformed policeman stops the car. "Do you have a permit?" he asks. This is crowd control. Thousands of people are making a pilgimage to this hill, but they're not coming to see the stone walls of medieval Visoki, or to have a vantage point from which to marvel at the rebuilding that has taken place since the 1992-1995 war. They're coming to look at, or help dig up, a pyramid in the heart of southeastern Europe.

Or rather, five pyramids. So says the Bosnian expatriate and self-styled researcher, Semir Osmanagic, who's leading the dig. In April of last year, the Sarajevo-born Osmanagic was in Visoko visiting the local museum director when he had an epiphany: The large hill overlooking the town, with its pyramid-like shape and sides corresponding with the four compass points, is actually the Bosnian "Pyramid of the Sun." He reckoned that four other pointy hills in the valley are the "Pyramid of the Moon," the "Pyramid of the Dragon," the "Pyramid of the Earth," and, at press time, an as-yet-unnamed pyramid.

Well, that's different. According to the article, Osmanagic has become quite the celebrity for these claims, assisted by charisma and an apparent tendency to dress like Indiana Jones. But is he crazy to think that there are pyramids in Bosnia?

Yes.

So, who is Semir Osmanagic? According to the press--the BBC and AP among others--he's a Bosnian archaeologist who's spent 15 years researching pyramids in the Western Hemisphere. But Osmanagic is no archaeologist. He's a Houston-based metalwork contractor who holds Sarajevo University degrees in economics and political science. His 15 years of "independent research" have resulted in publications like The World of the Maya, which claims the Maya were descendants of aliens from the Pleiades by way of Atlantis. As to why the Maya disappeared in the tenth century A.D., he ridicules standard archaeology as the work of "Masonic cliques," and postulates, "Were perhaps those who were ready picked up in spaceships by their mentors from the Pleiades star cluster? Or perhaps they joined the Lords of the Galaxy and, in pods of light, set off on a journey of no return.

Wait, haven't I heard something like this before? From the similarly credentialed Freelance Police?

"Look, Max! It's those pyramid building aliens I've heard about in speculative films and books! They came to earth to build these immense structures to keep their razor blades sharp and their hamburger fresh!"

--Sam and Max, Fair Wind to Java

And as usual, and I hate to keep making this point over and over again but there's just no shortage of woo out there set me off, sloppy thinking from mystics and the credulous is actually going to cause much more serious problems down the line. Osmanagic's been able to take advantage of the disorganized Bosnian government and his new fame to grab digging permits for the hills. And while he's tearing them apart to look for little green men, real historical artifacts will almost certainly be disturbed or destroyed.

Bosnia's archaeological heritage is considerable--of the six former Yugoslav republics that broke apart in the 1990s, only Macedonia has more sites--and in April some 20 Bosnian archaeologists and historians issued a protest letter and lobbied for Osmanagic's dig to be stopped. They noted that the Visoko area holds stecci (medieval Bosnian gravestones) and remains of Neolithic, Roman, and medieval sites, which they fear an amateur dig could destroy. Archaeologists say that Osmanagic has already destroyed medieval graves, though at press time there was no publicly available evidence that he had disturbed burials.

Like everyone else who makes these kinds of ridiculous claims, Osmanagic simply ignores critics and lies about his "accomplishments," claiming to have published articles that don't exist, and trumpeting laughable evidence. The pictures in Archeology are always fantastic, but here they're stunningly mundane. In one, Osmanagic stands next to a cordoned-off trench revealing what he claims is the first wall of the pyramid. It just looks like a big rock. The hill itself doesn't look particularly pyramid-like. If you published that picture with the caption "Low mountains of the Shenandoah river valley," no-one would look twice.

Archaeology has an update on the article, and the gullible media coverage of the "pyramid," here. Atlantis figures into it.

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June 30, 2006

Pyramid Scheme

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