(Originally written for my other blog indohoy.com which exists no more, 2016)
I was riding in a cab in the midst of Jakarta skyscraper jungle and suddenly a question popped up in my mind. “What if one day Jakarta becomes a buried city? How long would it take to dig the dirt and uncover all the buildings?” This thought didn’t come out of nowhere. I was looking up the buildings after posting a photo on Instagram from my recent visit to Liyangan, a buried ancient city located in Central Java.
Liyangan, or sometimes spelled Liangan, is barely known by Indonesians. I first heard about it only a few months before our trip, and decided to join the tour because it was going to be guided by an archeologist, Sugeng Riyanto. Pak Sugeng, who is also the head of the Liyangan excavation project, explained so many things about the site, gathered since the project started in 2008. Until November 2016, when we visited, they had excavated a land 3 hectares wide and 7 meters deep. According to Pak Sugeng that is a fast progress. “We’ve got much help from the sand miners who first found the ruins and then helped digging along the way,” he said.