DuVernois Blog

A pyramid in Bosnia?

Well, I have to admit I was initially excited about this possibility. A buried pyramid in Bosnia? Built perhaps 1200 years ago? There was a bunch of uncritical news coverage:

• Yahoo.
  
• MSNBC.
  
• Sydney Morning Herald.
  
• The BBC.
  

The archeologists have a website here where they post updates on the pyramid. Okay, fair enough, the project seems to be led by a Semir Osmanagic who is a resident of Houston, TX, and an amateur archeologist. Looking further, we find that this is a controversial claim and professional archeologists are greatly concerned about damage that this excavation will produce on real archeological sites:

• "This is total nonsense. It’s impossible. There was no high culture in this region at that time capable of building something on this scale,” said Professor Enver Imamovic, a respected archeologist from Sarajevo.
  
• “They should not be allowed to destroy genuine sites in the pursuit of these delusions,” Garrett Fagan, a professor at Penn State University, said. “It’s as if someone were given permission to bulldoze Stonehenge to find secret chambers of lost ancient wisdom underneath.”
  
• "In most countries of Europe those with wacky theories about “hidden mysteries” on presumed archaeological sites are free to propound them but not to undertake excavation, which by its very nature destroys much of what it uncovers; let alone excavation by those unqualified in terms of training and experience."
  
• This blog is claimed to be a running commentary on the claims, but my language ability limits what I can get out of it.
  

Ouch! What to make of this? Well, let's look at a summary online. Looks like pros and cons. Investigating a little further, we find that this "archeologist's" book on the Maya is available online in English translation. It's called The World of the Maya and it's a ridiculous pile of pseudoscientific babble. Let me quote:

• "The Maya are creatures of the light. And the cosmic expressed through sacred codes in geometry, color, musical notes and alphabet."
  
• "Maya is a key Hindu philosophical term meaning “creation of the world” and “the world of illusion”. In Sanskrit “Maya” is connected with the concepts of “great” “measure” ”mind” and “mother”. For this reason, it may not surprise us to learn that Maya was the name of Buddha’s mother. The Veda tell us that Maya was the name of a great astronomer and architect."
  
• "And the Galaxy can be described as a vast unending flow of energy… in which sets of numbers are pulsating and radiating."
  
• "The Maya were informed about the Cosmos. Wherever they went they carried this information with them. Throughout the planets they were able to establish a two-way flow of galactic information."
  
• "When the “heavens open” and cosmic energy is allowed to flow throughout our tiny Planet, will we be raised to a higher level by the vibrations… to overcome the age of darkness which has been oppressing us?"
  

Shoot! I had been hoping that this would be a cool story. A new pyramid, in Bosnia of all odd places. An old civilization that built bigger things than people thought they had. Instead it's a desecration of actual archeological sites by someone on a higher mission. A mission to sell books with kooky ideas in them. Cosmic consciousness and Vedic this and that, not an actual dig for discovery. The coverage appears to have been especially uncritical, according to this report, in Bosnia itself where a nationalistic furvor over the "discovery" has obscured the problems.

Posted by duver001 at April 25, 2006 01:29 PM | TrackBack