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Posted on You Tube by
UnchartedX (
517K subscribers) Jan 28, 2024
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@PortAntissues @PortAntissues 1 month ago
I appreciate that a lot of work of a number of people went into making this, but despite that, you have not really shown the evidence for the four phases of this site being as you say.
“Unit one”, OK, no problem. But “Unit two”... the film that you say is of exposed elements of this phase seems to show a stacked wall (and no evidence of “mortar” was visible), but as the film develops so does the suspicion that what is shown is merely part of the reveting of the terraces of the “Unit one” phase. Even if some of it goes under "Unit One" features, why is it simply not a levelling or foundation layer, rather than being a separate structure in its own right? If it is a structure, why did you not use the exposed portions and the cross sections provided by the geophysical examination to show its extent and characteristics? Was this not documented properly during the original work, which is why you cannot show it?
The question of documentation is vital. In the report you used to compile this, we see lots of attractive colourful pictures but not a single proper site plan. There is no plan showing where trenches were dug or boreholes drilled, I cannot find proper archaeological documentation in the report (not even a basic plan/section) of the several trenches dug, just schematic diagrams. As noted above, no documentation of the exposed bits of "Unit two"
I really cannot see “Unit three” as the artificial structure claimed. What you show in the section in the film [alongside a diagram that looks nothing like it] is mostly soil and weathered rock. Surely, it is simply a scree deposit. “Spheroidal weathering”, there are no embedded columns forming a “structure” in the bit (or diagram) you show, these are clearly just rocks that have weathered down from above (what geological layer was on top of the extruded – or rather Intruded - lava that formed the basalt, and where did that go? You’d expect bits of it to be left on top of the underlying rock but under the manmade construction built on it (Umm, like your “Units three and four”). If its a loose scree on a slope, that explains the "water loss" when unit three was drilled into, and echoes of "voids".
You utterly fail to shown ANY evidence that “Unit four” was “carefully sculpted”. How could you even determine that if it was all completely buried and all you have are a few boreholes? If it was of solid rock, then the soil samples must be from above it (Unit three?)- and if that was washed down from above, or contaminated by the water flowing into the borehole then that is a very uncertain context for those 14C samples.
If this really is a case (as the local archaeologists who were concerned by what they saw happening on this site possibly also thought) of an unprepared digger misinterpreting the layers (e.g., natural for artificial), and unable to produce the proper documentation of the fieldwork backing up the claims [extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, no?] then the work should have been stopped.
My comments are not archaeological suppression/ censorship/ bullying, or whatever, it is just applying simple logic to what you have presented here. This IS bad archaeology, and a pretty useless basis on which to draw any conclusions, even about what was actually done in the fieldwork project. IMO, there are so many flaws here that the journal’s academic editors must have been asleep when they accepted that article for publication.
I later added
@PortAntissues @PortAntissues 0 seconds ago The paper with the "dating evidence" that you cite has now been withdrawn as flawed by the editors of the journal: "Retraction: Geo‐Archaeological prospecting of Gunung Padang buried prehistoric pyramid in West Java, Indonesia". Archaeological Prospection. 18 March 2024. doi.org/10.1002/arp.1932
