Revealing the mysterious civilization in Indonesia

Scientists believe that traces of Tambora civilization lost to Indonesia have been found. This entire ancient society was wiped out in 1815 by the largest volcanic eruption in history.

Haraldur Sigurdsson at the site excavated on Mount Tambora.( Photo: AP )

The disaster from Mount Tambora on April 10, 1815 buried all living creatures on Sumbawa Island under layers of ash and rock.

Following a ground-based radar wave, US and Indonesian researchers dug out a trench where they found traces of a house made of straw, pottery, copper, skeletons of two people, all of them. under the sediment from the volcanic eruption.

Volcanic researcher Haraldur Sigurdsson at the University of Rhode Island estimated that about 10,000 people lived in the town when a sudden volcano erupted, similar to the eruption that buried Rome's Pompeii city.

The anger of Tambora mountain shot 400 million tons of sulfur gas into the air, making the entire planet cold and creating the period that historians call " One Year Without Summer ". Farms in Maine, USA, suffered from a killing of crops in June, July and August. In France and Germany, grape and corn crops were destroyed, harvests stagnated.

Civilization on Sumbawa Island has been curious to researchers since a group of Dutch and British explorers visited this land in the early 1800s. They were surprised to hear a language is not the same as the language spoken in Indonesia. Some scholars believe that this language seems more like the language in Indochina. But not long after the first Europeans arrived in Tambora, this whole society was destroyed.

" The volcanic eruption wiped that language. What a pity. But we are trying to get these people to speak again, by digging them up ," Sigurdsson said.

What the researchers found proved that residents of Tambora came from Indochina or had trade relations with the area. For example, pottery was discovered very similar to products in Vietnam.

John Miksic, an archaeologist at the National University of Singapore, watched the video of the excavation and believed Sigurdsson's team had found the right residential area destroyed by the volcano. But he doubted that the Tamora came from Indochina or spoke the language of the region. If Vietnamese ceramics reach this island, it may be due to trade between merchants.

During the excavation, Sigurdsson's team also found the skeleton of a woman's ash ashing probably in her kitchen. A machete and a melted bottle are nearby. The body of another person was found just outside, probably in front of the entrance.

MT