Viktor Ačimović is a veteran archaeologist with over twenty years of field experience, and currently a lead supervisor in the Archaeological Park: Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation. He has worked projects in his native Serbia, all over former Yugoslavia and the rest of Europe, so many he can’t cite a number.
Interviewed by Ed Weinberg
Viktor Ačimović is a veteran archaeologist with over twenty years of field experience, and currently a lead supervisor in the Archaeological Park: Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation. He has worked projects in his native Serbia, all over former Yugoslavia and the rest of Europe, so many he can’t cite a number.
For the past month he has been involved in this project as both an expert hand and something of a guru, with the most experience of any professional on the project. He started his involvement working excavation site 5 with fellow archaeologist Aleksandra Andelković on the Pyramid of the Sun. Work on this square has since been put on hiatus, and here Mr. Ačimović was so kind as to give me some remarks on this experience.
Though the square is very interesting structurally, nothing of significant archaeological value has been found. The one relevant find was made days before the work stoppage, a cluster of small pottery shards. But this discovery includes a caveat: “That pottery was not in situ, it fell from the top, it was not a classic archaeological layer. It was the only thing.”
Mr. Ačimović doesn’t write off future possibilities for this site, however. “Okay, we have nothing to do in archaeology, but one day maybe we will dig something up, something interesting for archaeology.
“We can’t be [the discoverer of Troy, Heinrich] Schliemann, every one of us. And I can’t expect that I can be Schliemann every day. “We need time and we need money and we need help, and maybe one day we will find something. I try to be skeptical. That’s archaeology. I know what I’m doing and who I am. When I find the next Troy, I will call you and you will come.”
I ask him, “Could you?”
He smiles a broad, generous smile. “I would like that.”
After a brief, grounding pause, the venerable archaeologist gives me some insight to his approach on this project. “I’m objective. It’s some object. I’m sure it is some object. But you can call it anything you want.
“We need time to see what is here, we need proof. To see is it a pyramid or not, or what kind of object is it. We are waiting for that time.”
