Ancient Apocalypse archaeology update 2: Are there underground chambers at Gunung Padang?

In Ancient Apocalypse (see part 1 of my discussion), Graham Hancock takes us to Indonesia, to Gunung Padang, a very large, very impressive hilltop structure, built a very long time ago. He argues that the standard archaeological interpretation of the site is wrong, that it has massive underground chambers, like some of the pyramids of Egypt, and that it is at least twice as old as currently thought, dating back to the end of the last ice age at least.

He argues that the “simple hunter-gatherers” who were living in that region at the time of its construction would have been incapable of such a feat, and concludes that it must have been the result of an intervention by one of the great teachers who escaped the cataclysm that destroyed an advanced ice age civilization. This is a theme to which Hancock comes back again and again in the series.

Let’s first look at the specific claims about Gurung Padang, and then I will discuss the overall idea of the escapee great teachers a bit further on.

The claim

The claim seems to come from a poster (Danny et al 2018) presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington DC. The author is featured on the episode, and it looks like many of the graphs and evidence shown in the episode are directly from the poster presentation.

The main data consist of ground penetrating radar, resistivity, and seismic tomography imaging. Very roughly, these data can be interpreted to  show variations in density of underground materials. It can show you where there are big dense masses, metal rich masses, high humidity, loose soil, etc.

From Danny et al 2018

Are there chambers?

Yes and no. It depends what one means by chambers. The data do indicate significant variations in density underground, as the graphs show clearly. Just how dense are the dense areas, and just how empty are the less dense areas would need to be determined by digging.

Gunung Padang is a volcanic hill. It isn’t surprising that there would be tubes, voids, crevices, even chambers. While I am not a geologist, volcanic or otherwise, my first question is whether the low density area labeled “tunnel/chamber” in the graph above is a chimney in a volcanic cone, especially as the volcanic tuff shoulders of the hill are consistent with that interpretation. I would want to rule that out before concluding that there is a secret ice age chamber built by a great teacher who escaped the destruction of Atlantis.

Overall, there are definitely low density areas under Gunung Padang. We need to know whether they really are voids, or whether they are just very loose compared to the surrounding ground (matrix). If they are voids, are they natural? If they are not natural, do they contain anything?

There are many questions to ask and to answer on the basis of the data presented here before concluding that Gunung Padang is a ten thousand year old palace.

Nor is it surprising that hunter-gatherers would have put up an impressive megalithic structure. There are such structures of a similar age and older around the world, put up by the increasingly large and sedentary groups of hunter-gatherers living near and around the agricultural centres of that era, or already experimenting with agriculture themselves, from Arctic Finland to Southeast Asia. 

These are very well known, archaeologically speaking, and they are not a surprise. They are the kind of expressions of community to which humans are prone. We see them all around us today, and we have been building them for a long time. They are associated with the usual ceramics, stone tools, and subsistence remains that we see in the rest of the archaeological record in residential sites of the same ages in the same regions.

A further thought on the great teachers

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who see change as a good thing, and those who see it as a bad thing. Things either get better over time, which is a progressivist mindset, or they get worse over time, which denotes a degenerationist mindset.

The idea of the lost great civilization, destroyed by a cataclysm, the idea that everything we have today is a pale copy of that civilization, transmitted to us by wise and powerful escapees of the catastrophe, and that our ancestors would have been unable to create anything significant without their help, arises from a fundamentally degenerationist perspective on change.

The more I listen to Hancock’s presentation, the more kinship I see between his ideas and traditional religious accounts of The Fall. In that conception, change is bad unless it is guided by a benevolent external force, in this case the great teachers, in other cases, a divine being. Normal, everyday humans can only make things worse by our actions. We need external help to make things better.

I happen to be the kind of person to whom these degenerationist accounts are inherently appealing. I don’t have much confidence, for example, that we can collectively emerge from the mess in which we’re put ourselves as a global society. But I try not to let that get in the way of my evaluation of hypotheses about the archaeological record.And I see nothing at Gunung Padang that forces me to accept that there is a lost ice age civilization.

References

Danny, H. N., Bachtiar, A., Endar, B., Daryono, M., & Subandrio, A. (2018). Evidences of Large pyramid-like structure predating 10,000 Year BP at Mount Padang, West Java, Indonesia: Applications of geological-geophysical methods to explore buried large archeological site. American Geophysical Union. https://doi.org/10.1002/essoar.10500119.1