This photo has NOT been altered in any way.
Posted on 12/04/2005 2:49:23 PM PST by blam
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER ANCIENT MOUND
[December 03, 2005, 19:00:35]
As a result of the archaeological dig in the territory of Agstafa region, through which the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil and South Caucasus gas pipelines pass, scientists of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences have discovered ancient mound dating back to the 4th millennium B.C.
The finding considered to be the most ancient one of this kind in the Southern Caucasus testifies that the tradition of manufacturing burial stones first began in Azerbaijan, and later spread to the Northern Caucasus.
I don't know why, but Helen Thomas comes to mind.....
Ancient mounds, you mean?
Ancient...yes,
Mounds?.....now I'm gonna hurl
Ancient...yes,
Mounds?.....now I'm gonna hurl
Scientist: Bosnian Hill May Have Pyramid
VISOKO, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Dec. 4, 2005
(AP) With eyes trained to recognize 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 civilization 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 realize what this is."
Osmanagic, 45, who now lives in Houston, is personally financing excavations at the Visocica hill, a 2,120-foot hump outside Visoko, a town about 20 miles 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 artifacts. Hodovic had attended a promotion of an Osmanagic book about ancient civilizations 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. It reminded Osmanagic of pairs of pyramids he has seen in Latin America that together create a gateway into a valley.
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. 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 civilization 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 theorizes 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 A.D. 600. Little is known about the Illyrians, but Osmanagic thinks they were more sophisticated than many experts have suggested.
Nukic, who has walked up and down the hill several times, said she noticed symmetrical platforms in the slopes _ indentations that Osmanagic believes are steps built into the pyramid.
A local businessman who bought a lot at the foot of the hill and brought in a bulldozer to dig the foundation for a house, meanwhile, unearthed manmade sandstone plates that the archeologists think may have been paving stones.
Anthropologists say the Visoko valley already offers ample evidence of organized human settlements dating back 7,000 years. The town was Bosnia's capital during the Middle Ages, and German archaeologists working the valley recently found 24,000 Neolithic artifacts just three feet below the surface.
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.
"Not that I don't believe in a pyramid here," he added. "This place was always called 'Pyramid' by the local population. But we have to prove that this is not a natural shape."
He thinks, however, that the shape of the hill speaks for itself.
"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."
Sometimes you feel like a nut....sometimes you don't!
Pleeeeeeeeeeease don't post any pictures!
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God... making the entire universe or the human body is understandable and quite boring to this chap but God making a simple paramid shaped mound astounds him. Funny!
The story doesn't put a date on the supposed pyramid at Visoko, B&H.
The Illyrians aren't very well known since we don't have anything they wrote, just occasional mentions of them by Greek and Roman authors, plus archaeological evidence. Whether the people in central Bosnia were true Illyrians is uncertain. This may have been the territory of a tribe the Romans called Daesitiates, but whether they were there at the time of the pyramid (if it is a pyramid) is unclear.
There's a good book in English by John Wilkes entitled The Illyrians (Blackwell, 1992). There was a report more recently of discoveries in a cave along the Dalmatian coast (Peljesac peninsula) that may shed light on Illyrian religion.
Yup. I was trying to lump mounds and pyramids found in unexpected places in the same spirit as the below linked book.
The second Spanish attempt to conquer the Yucatan area was in 1531-34 under Francisco de Montejo. One of the soldiers in this army was a young Dalmatian who later became a Dominican priest (Fray Vicente Palatino de Curzola), who later wrote one of the earliest descriptions of Chichen-Itza. He discovered the Mayan writing on the ruins and decided it must be Carthaginian (well, it certainly wasn't Latin, Greek, or Hebrew).
Maybe closer to Chinese?
That is so mean. I'm a nice person; why would you do this to me? :)
Afro-centrists claim that the Olmec sculptures show African features (a sign that the Meso-American civilization was the result of diffusion from Africa).
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