Visoko - With eyes trained to recognise pyramids hidden in the hills of El Salvador, Mexico and Peru, Semir Osmanagic has been drawn to the mound overlooking this central Bosnian town.
"It has all the elements: four perfectly shaped slopes pointing toward the cardinal points, a flat top and an entrance complex," he said, gazing at the hill and wondering what lies beneath.
No pyramids are known in Europe, and there is no evidence any ancient civilisation there ever attempted to build one.
But Osmanagic, a Bosnian archaeologist who has spent the last 15 years studying the pyramids of Latin America, suspects there is one here in his Balkan homeland.
"We have already dug out stone blocks which I believe are covering the pyramid," he said. "We found a paved entrance plateau and discovered underground tunnels. You don't have to be an expert to realise what this is."
Personally financing excavations
Osmanagic, 45, who now lives in Houston, is personally financing excavations at the Visocica hill, a 645m hump outside Visoko, a town about 30km northwest of the capital, Sarajevo.
He learned about the hill in April from Senad Hodovic, director of a museum devoted to the history of Visoko, which is rich in Bronze Age and medieval artefacts. Hodovic had attended a promotion of an Osmanagic book about ancient civilisations and thought he would like to see Visoko's pyramid-shaped hill.
When the pair climbed the hill, the sweeping view revealed a second, smaller pyramid-shaped hill.
After obtaining a permit to research the site, which is protected by the state as a national monument, the first probes of the main hill were carried out this summer at six points.
Debate over manmade hills Nadja Nukic, a geologist involved in the research, said she found 15 anomalies suggesting that some layers of the hill were manmade.
"We found layers of what we call 'bad concrete', a definitely unnatural mixture of gravel once used to form blocks with which this hill was covered," Osmanagic said.
"The hill was already there," he added. "Some ancient civilisation just shaped it and then coated it with this primitive concrete - and there you have a pyramid."
Small-scale excavations continued until early November, when winter set in, with the work focusing on what Osmanagic theorises may have been the entrance to a pyramid-shaped temple.
Osmanagic believes the hill was shaped by the Illyrian people, who inhabited the Balkan peninsula long before Slavic tribes conquered it around AD. 600.
Anthropologists say the Visoko valley already offers ample evidence of organised human settlements dating back 7 000 years.
Osmanagic is taking a cautious approach about the hill.
"No fast conclusions, please. The evidence has to be firm, at least beyond a reasonable doubt," he said.
"God can make many things, but such perfectly geometrically formed slopes, pointing exactly toward the north, south, east and west - if he did that, well, that's phenomenal itself."
Mohammedan scholars will conclude that this is definitive evidence that the original inhabitants of Bosnia (as everywhere else) were mohammedans.
