Gunung Padang’s Age Dispute Sparks Global Archaeological Controversy

via New York Times, 03 January 2024: Gunung Padang has become the center of a heated debate after claims that it might be the world’s oldest pyramid, dating back to 27,000 years ago. These assertions, fueled by a geologist’s study and nationalistic narratives, face skepticism from the archaeologists who stress the lack of physical evidence. This article adds a number of different perspectives from the stories published so far (see also here and here), notably the inclusion of many local voices – Indonesian archaeologists, archaeologists who have worked in Indonesia and myself. The controversy has been intensified by a Netflix documentary and is currently under scrutiny by the publishing journal amid concerns of nationalist mythmaking and pseudoscience.

Several archaeologists said the study’s major problem is that it dated the human presence at Gunung Padang based on radiocarbon measurements of soil from drilling samples — not of artifacts recovered from the site.

“The lesson is that radiocarbon dates are not magic, and have important caveats around their interpretation,” the archaeologist Rebecca Bradley wrote in a 2016 critique of Mr. Natawidjaja’s preliminary findings. (She said in an email that his recently published study struck her as “a more organized recapitulation of the same old stuff.”)

Mr. Tan, the archaeologist in Bangkok, described the study’s attempt to link the soil’s age to human activity as its “biggest logical fallacy.” The soil’s age is not surprising because soil accumulates over time and deeper layers tend to be older, he added. “But it’s not soil that is tied to construction activity. It’s not soil that’s tied to, say, a fire pit, or soil that’s tied to a burial.”

“It’s just soil,” he said.

Ceramics and other evidence from the upper layers of Gunung Padang indicates that humans were there as early as the 12th or 13th centuries, and that they built structures atop natural rock formations, said Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz, an archaeologist who has conducted research in Indonesia.

“There could have been some people before, but they didn’t leave anything that we can date, so far,” said Professor Tjoa-Bonatz, who teaches at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Harry Truman Simanjuntak, an Indonesian archaeologist, said he also saw the study’s pyramid claim as unsubstantiated.

“There are always scientists who are illusionists and practice pseudoscience, seeking knowledge that is not based on data,” he said.

Source: ‘World’s Oldest Pyramid’? A Study’s Claim Troubles Archaeologists – The New York Times