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A team of geologists is planning to probe the structure of Mount Sadahurip in West Java, but claim they are not checking whether there is a pyramid underneath as rumors alleged.

A group of travel organizers, Geotrek Indonesia, has previously alleged that Sadahurip, which has an almost perfect pyramid shape, in Garut district is much too pyramidal in shape to be a natural occurrence.

The Study Team for Ancient Catastrophic Disaster will drill wells to obtain core samples of the mountain and study the volcanic activities that formed it, not to look for any man-made structure underneath.

“There’s some confusion. We’re not looking for a pyramid, but for earthquake data,” Andi Arief, a presidential adviser for disaster management, told a discussion on civilization and ancient disasters on Tuesday.

He said that although the study was on volcanology, if the team found signs of a man-made structure underneath, the data would be forwarded to the appropriate institutions to follow up on.

He said drilling would be conducted in an environmentally sensitive way.

Awang Harun Satyana, an interpreter with Geotrek Indonesia, told the same discussion that Sadahurip had the form and symmetry of a pyramid.

“It does show the form and symmetry of a pyramid. The history of Indonesian culture itself does have historical structures similar to pyramids, which we call terraced hills,” Awang said.

But skepticism of the pyramid theory ran high, with Sujatmiko, a geologist from the Indonesian Geological Experts Association, providing an explanation for the natural formation of Sadahurip.

Seen from the regional geography, Sadahurip is located on a dominant volcanic line in West Java. Sujatmiko said Sadahurip was formed as a pyroclastic volcanic mound from magma that emerged from the surface without a magma channel beneath.

I Gde Pitana, the acting director general of the Tourism and Creative Economy Ministry, said that Indonesia’s history did not include pyramids.

“So far there is not a single archeological finding that indicates that there are pyramids in Indonesia,” he said.

He said that Indonesia had enough mountains and peaks to eliminate the need to build tall structures for worship purposes in the past.

Pitana said that his ministry had asked the Bandung Archeology Office to conduct tests and research on the site to see whether Sadahurip’s structure was man-made or natural.

“The information we received is that there is a stone structure looking like a stepped pyramid,” he said.

However, he said an expert from the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) had said that such stone step structures could be found on many islands that were formerly at the bottom of the ocean and were pushed up by the movement of the Earth’s crust.

Additional reporting from Antara