{"it":{"id":"EUR-002","kind":"site","sub":"Europe and the Mediterranean","name":"Bosnian pyramid claims","place":"Bosnia and Herzegovina","lat":43.977,"lon":18.176,"date":"In an interview with Philip Coppens in Nexus (April–May 2006), Osmanagić suggested that…","mat":"clay;earth;sandstone","nfacts":7,"tags":["Europe","Pyramids"],"sum":"Since October 2005, the businessman Semir Osmanagić has claimed that hills near Visoko in Bosnia are the largest pyramids on Earth. The ages he has given have run into the tens of thousands of years. In 2006 a group of European archaeologists, including the president of the European Association of Archaeologists, called the project a cruel hoax.\n\nWhat is established: the hills are made of natural clay, sandstone and earth layers.","why":"It is a modern claim, rejected by geologists and archaeologists, that still draws volunteers and visitors two decades on.","src":[286,587,588],"nsrc":4,"yt":"Tourism has helped Visoko's economy. Should that change how archaeologists respond to the pyramid claim?","rel":["GUN-PAD","YON-MON"],"hook":"Since 2005, hills near Visoko have been sold as the world's largest pyramids. Geologists call them flatirons."},"S":{"286":["Wikipedia: Bosnian pyramid claims","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims"],"587":["Open letter by European archaeologists incl. the EAA president, December 2006","https://www.robertschoch.com/articles/schoch_eaa_statement.pdf"],"588":["Science 2006, Researchers Helpless as Bosnian Pyramid Bandwagon Gathers Pace","https://doi.org/10.1126/science.314.5807.1862a"]},"rec":{"id":"EUR-002","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"They are claimed to be 2 4 miles","a":"length","v":"3.8","u":"km","o":"REF10 They are claimed to be 2.4 miles (3.8 km) long.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1363725286 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1372"},{"f":"claim","a":"launched","v":"Oct 2005 (Osmanagic)","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Bosnian pyramid claims","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Bosnian pyramid claims","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3451"},{"f":"claim","a":"builders (claim)","v":"Illyrians, 12,000-500 BC","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Bosnian pyramid claims","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Bosnian pyramid claims","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M3452"},{"f":"geology team","a":"drill holes","v":"6 at 3-17 m depth","u":"count","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Bosnian pyramid claims","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Bosnian pyramid claims","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"natural formation; Vrabac: dozens of similar in basin","id":"M3453"},{"f":"Osmanagic claimed age","a":"value","v":"34,000 yr (2017)","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Bosnian pyramid claims","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Bosnian pyramid claims","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"claim","id":"M3612"},{"f":"Ravne tunnels","a":"claim","v":"ancient man-made network (Osmanagic)","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Bosnian pyramid claims","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Bosnian pyramid claims","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"no measured dimensions on page -> gap","id":"M3613"},{"f":"mainstream","a":"regional capability","v":"large structures only from ~2,500 yr ago; no such earthworks","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Bosnian pyramid claims","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Bosnian pyramid claims","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M3614"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"REF27 REF28 The \"pyramid\" is composed of the same matter as mountains in the area; layers of conglomerate, clay and sandstone.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"height","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"largest_block","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"block_mass","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"slope_face_angle","r":"no published face/slope angle in sources reached (often n/a for non-pyramidal sites)"},{"a":"wall_batter","r":"no published batter survey in free sources"},{"a":"orientation","r":"no published azimuth reached"},{"a":"corner_precision","r":"no published precision survey in free sources"},{"a":"levelness","r":"no published levelling survey in free sources"},{"a":"quarry_source","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"mortar","r":"dry-stone construction or no binder analysis in free sources"},{"a":"dating","r":"no absolute date extracted"},{"a":"coords_elevation","r":"no elevation row yet"},{"a":"volume_labor","r":"no volume/labour estimate in sources opened"},{"a":"construction_phases","r":"no phase sequence in sources opened"},{"a":"lab_date_material","r":"no lab date with dated material in sources opened"},{"a":"hydrology_acoustics","r":"no published hydrology/acoustic measurement in sources opened"},{"a":"magnetic_radiation","r":"no published magnetic/radiation survey found (searched site name + magnetometry/radiation; Wikipedia, Google Scholar snippets)"},{"a":"metals_clamps","r":"no metal/clamp evidence reported in sources opened"},{"a":"excavation_history","r":"no excavation history row yet"},{"a":"artifacts_found","r":"no finds row yet"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA031","a":"man-made 12,000+ yr pyramids","who":"Semir Osmanagić (since 2005); Semir Osmanagic (2005-); Semir Osmanagic","main":"natural flatirons (EAA 2006)","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims ; https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286 ; https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286","st":"contradicted","n":"only 1 measurement row","nl":3},{"id":"AA057","a":"man-made pyramids","who":"Semir Osmanagić (since 2005); Semir Osmanagic (2005-); Semir Osmanagic","main":"natural flatirons","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims ; https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286 ; https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286","st":"contradicted","n":"6 drill holes natural rock","nl":7}],"ac":[{"v":"Bosnian pyramids are 12,000+ yr man-made pyramids","who":"Semir Osmanagić (since 2005)","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims","b":"I","ce":"geologists: natural flatirons of clastic sediments; EAA declaration 2006"},{"v":"Visocica and nearby hills are man-made pyramids","who":"Semir Osmanagic (2005-)","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286","b":"I","ce":"6 drill holes: natural layered clastic rock; dozens of similar flatirons"},{"v":"Visoko hills are 34,000-yr pyramids with Ravne tunnels","who":"Semir Osmanagic","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286","b":"I","ce":"natural flatirons; no regional builders"}],"me":[{"v":"natural hills","ev":"EAA; Harding (The Times, 25 Apr 2006)","s":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims"},{"v":"natural flatiron landforms","ev":"Vrabac / Univ. Tuzla geology team; EAA 2006 statement","s":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286"},{"v":"natural hills","ev":"enwiki Bosnian pyramid claims","s":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286"}],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"In an interview with Philip Coppens in Nexus (April–May 2006), Osmanagić suggested that they were most likely constructed by the Illyrians, who (according to Osmanagić) lived in the area from 12,000 BC to 500 BC.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"43.97694444","lon":"18.17611111","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"wave8: hill summit (delta 0.0008 deg)","osm":"https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/details.html?osmtype=N&osmid=611119162"},"src":[{"id":"S0270","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnian_pyramid_claims&oldid=1363725286"},{"id":"S0446","t":"","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims"},{"id":"S2588","t":"Open letter by European archaeologists incl. the EAA president, December 2006","u":"https://www.robertschoch.com/articles/schoch_eaa_statement.pdf"},{"id":"S2589","t":"Science 2006, Researchers Helpless as Bosnian Pyramid Bandwagon Gathers Pace","u":"https://doi.org/10.1126/science.314.5807.1862a"},{"id":null,"t":"Robert M. Schoch, “The Bosnian Pyramid Phenomenon”, revised from The New Archaeology Review 1(8), September 2006, author’s website","u":"https://www.robertschoch.com/bosnia.html"},{"id":null,"t":"Colin Woodard, “The Mystery of Bosnia’s Ancient Pyramids”, Smithsonian magazine, December 2009","u":"https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-mystery-of-bosnias-ancient-pyramids-148990462/"},{"id":null,"t":"Archaeological Park: Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation, “Underground Labyrinth Ravne” (advocate source)","u":"https://piramidasunca.ba/en/underground-labyrinth-ravne/"},{"id":null,"t":"Department of Mining, Geology and Civil Engineering, University of Tuzla, “Report on the geological explorations of Visočica hill near Visoko”, 17 April 2006, as reproduced on the geolog-mrak blog","u":"https://irna.fr/docs/geolog-mrak/54757.aspx.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"Andrew Lawler, “AMS radiocarbon dating of a wood sample from Tunnel Ravne”, foundation conference paper (ICBP 2008), PDF","u":"https://www.irna.fr/IMG/pdf/Andrew_Report_ICBP.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Commission to Preserve National Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina, national monuments table, entry “Historijsko područje – Stari grad Visoki”","u":"https://kons.gov.ba/Publication/Read/nacionalni-spomenici-tabela"}],"sum":"\"Thin sandstone layers broke into small blocks while thick and durable conglomerate layers broke into massive blocks.\" The geologist Robert Schoch wrote that sentence after spending about ten days on a hill in central Bosnia in the summer of 2006, and it is the quiet key to everything that followed. Builders choose the size of their blocks. Bedrock does not. It splits along its own layers, thin where the layer is thin and thick where it is thick, and the \"blocks\" on this hill grew and shrank exactly as the rock around them did.\n\nThe hill is Visočica, which rises roughly 720 feet above the small town of Visoko. From the right angle it has an unsettling outline: a broad triangular face that narrows toward the summit. Since October 2005 it has been sold to the world as the \"Pyramid of the Sun,\" the largest pyramid on Earth. On its summit sits something genuinely old and entirely documented: the ruins of Visoki Castle, a fourteenth-century fortress built over a Roman observation post. Visoko was the capital of Bosnia in the Middle Ages. To accept the pyramid, a visitor had to believe that a medieval Bosnian fort had been raised on top of a monument larger than anything in Egypt, and that nobody had noticed.\n\nThe man behind the claim is Semir Osmanagić, a Bosnian-American businessman and writer based in Houston. In the account Colin Woodard gave in Smithsonian magazine in 2009, Osmanagić described Visočica as one of three pyramids around the town, all \"some 12,000 years old,\" together forming \"the greatest pyramidal complex ever built on the face of the earth.\" A second hill, Pljesevica, became the \"Pyramid of the Moon.\" Over the years the map grew to include a \"Pyramid of the Dragon,\" a \"Pyramid of Love,\" a \"Temple of Earth,\" and a network of tunnels said to link them. In a 2006 interview with Philip Coppens in the magazine Nexus he suggested the builders were most likely the Illyrians, who by his account lived in the region from 12,000 to 500 BC. By 2017 the age he gave had stretched to 34,000 years. In May 2006 he told the press, \"The history of civilization has to be rewritten.\"\n\nThat sentence explains much of the energy around Visoko. A claim that rewrites history offers something rare to anyone who joins it early: the role of the person who saw the truth while the experts were blind. It offered something to a country, too. Bosnia was still recovering from a war that had hit Visoko hard, and Woodard reports that the country's political leaders backed the project while foreign critics faced abuse. Anthony Harding, then president of the European Association of Archaeologists, kept a thick folder of letters denouncing him and filed it under one word: \"Abuse.\" Tourists came, volunteers dug, and the town's economy felt the lift. Osmanagić told Woodard that within ten years \"a million people will come to see what we have.\"\n\nThe rock was tested early. In 2006 Osmanagić's own team drilled cores, six holes reaching between 3 and 17 metres down, and geologists from the University of Tuzla re-examined them. Their report says Visočica \"is composed of clastic sediments exhibiting a layered structure\": sandstones, marls and clays below, conglomerates above. Clastic means made of fragments of older rock, washed together and compacted. These layers settled in the Zenica-Sarajevo basin in the upper Miocene, millions of years ago. The Tuzla team took nine \"anomalies\" from Osmanagić's book, among them \"bad concrete\" and a polished \"decorative flooring rock,\" and set each beside the field geologist's core log. In every case the log recorded an ordinary rock: marly clay, conglomerate, iron-stained greywacke. The anomalies, they concluded, did not exist.\n\nSchoch reached the same result on the ground. He saw \"only perfectly natural sandstones and conglomerates,\" cracked by tectonic stress and by the slow slumping of the slope under gravity. The layers had been tilted and folded, and the harder beds had broken into regular slabs that excavators then exposed and presented as \"pavements\" and \"terraces.\" In the stone he found fossil leaves, which poured concrete does not hold. He also accused workers of carving the hillside into steps. Paul Heinrich, an archaeological geologist at Louisiana State University, supplied the name for the landform. \"They're called 'flatirons' in the United States and you see a lot of them out West,\" he told Smithsonian, adding that there are \"hundreds around the world.\" A flatiron is a triangular face left behind where a hard, tilted layer resists erosion while softer rock wears away around it. Seen head on, it is a pyramid. Walk around it and the illusion falls apart.\n\nThe mainstream verdict was delivered in unusually blunt language. On 11 December 2006 the president of the European Association of Archaeologists and the heads of national archaeology bodies in Germany, France, Poland, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Britain signed a declaration calling the scheme \"a cruel hoax on an unsuspecting public\" with \"no place in the world of genuine science.\" Their deepest worry was not the hill but the money and attention drawn away from Bosnia's real heritage. In the same year the journal Science ran a headline that captured the mood among specialists: \"Researchers Helpless as Bosnian Pyramid Bandwagon Gathers Pace.\" The regional record supports them. In this part of Europe, large built structures appear only from about 2,500 years ago, and no earthworks on anything like this scale are known.\n\nOsmanagić did not accept the geology. He described the conglomerate slabs as concrete poured on site, a view backed by the French materials scientist Joseph Davidovits. His foundation now leans on radiocarbon dates. Its page on the Ravne tunnels says tests on organic material show that \"Tunnel builders built the complex over 12.000 years ago,\" and that a later civilisation sealed the passages \"over 4.600 years ago.\" The foundation's own paper, by its archaeologist Andrew Lawler, describes a piece of wood found \"embedded in the sediments\" of the Ravne tunnel in 2007 and dated by the Kiel laboratory to about 30,600 years before present. Read closely, the evidence turns against the claim it was meant to support. A date on wood inside sediment tells you when the tree died. It says nothing about when anyone dug a tunnel through that sediment.\n\nWhat remains unexplained at Visoko is human rather than geological. Schoch found one tunnel that had \"clearly been entered and modified in recent times,\" with graffiti and local stories of Yugoslav military use. How old the first passages are, and who first cut them, has not been settled by any published independent excavation. He was told that carved \"ancient inscriptions\" in the tunnels were not there when the team first went in. The geologist Nadija Nukić later told a Bosnian magazine that a worker said he had carved the letters of his children's names; the worker denied it on the foundation's website. Beneath all of it lies a real archaeology that the excitement nearly buried. Schoch reported \"evidence of Neolithic occupation\" on the hill, perhaps 5,000 years old, beneath the Roman and medieval remains. Bosnia's Commission to Preserve National Monuments lists the historic area of Stari grad Visoki as a national monument, first decided in March 2004 and amended in 2006 and 2008. How much of that layered site the pyramid digging harmed has never been publicly assessed.\n\nThere is a serious lesson folded into this hill, and it points away from Visoko rather than toward it. The real deep past is rarely shaped like a pyramid. It is a trace of Neolithic life under a Roman post under a medieval fort, waiting in the ground for patient hands, while the crowds climb past it toward a shape the rain made. On the summit of Visočica the ruined castle still stands, and below them, on the slope, the bedrock goes on breaking into its thin blocks and its thick ones, exactly as it has for millions of years, whether anyone is watching or not.","qs":["Tourism has helped Visoko's economy. Should that change how archaeologists respond to the pyramid claim?","Why do natural hills with regular shapes keep getting read as buildings, here and elsewhere?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Bosnian_Sun_Pyramid_Lookout.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bosnian_Sun_Pyramid_Lookout.jpg","title":"Bosnian Sun Pyramid Lookout.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"TheBIHLover","cap":"Bosnian Sun Pyramid lookout"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Alleged_Moon_Pyramid_in_Visoko.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alleged_Moon_Pyramid_in_Visoko.jpg","title":"Alleged Moon Pyramid in Visoko.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.5","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5","by":"Radosław Botev","cap":"Moon pyramid in Visoko, Bosnia"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/28/Bosnian_Pyramids_Ravne_Tunnels.JPG/1280px-Bosnian_Pyramids_Ravne_Tunnels.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bosnian_Pyramids_Ravne_Tunnels.JPG","title":"Bosnian Pyramids Ravne Tunnels.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"TheBIHLover","cap":"Megalith K2, with a lot of energy. Bosnian Pyramids Ravne tunnels."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/Bosnian_Pyramids_Tunnels.JPG/1280px-Bosnian_Pyramids_Tunnels.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bosnian_Pyramids_Tunnels.JPG","title":"Bosnian Pyramids Tunnels.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"TheBIHLover","cap":"Sidetunnel and drywall at Ravne tunnels."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/Bosnian_Pyramids_tunnels.JPG/1280px-Bosnian_Pyramids_tunnels.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bosnian_Pyramids_tunnels.JPG","title":"Bosnian Pyramids tunnels.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"TheBIHLover","cap":"The ancient drywall, Ravne tunnels."}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"Clay","h":"Made of: Clay, earth, sandstone","s":[41]}],"hs":{"41":["Wikipedia: Bosnian pyramid claims (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/EUR-002.webp","w":720,"h":540,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Bosnian_Sun_Pyramid_Lookout.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}