FAIR ENOUGH, BUT YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL when digging for the truth. To professional archaeologists, Osmanagic's methods seem like dental surgery with a chainsaw. No effort is being made to sift the dirt that's been shoveled away, and parts of the stone sheathing—the outer skin of the alleged pyramid—have already been hacked to bits.

One of Osmanagic's foremen is a burly local landowner in his late thirties who goes by the name Zombie. He wears military boots, walks with a stiff gait, and has a Boris Karloff face, all flat planes and angles, with two huge eyebrows that just about touch. His principal means of communication—and in this respect he is quite verbose—is a wink that doesn't fully close. He used to work in a meat factory.

"Whatever you see here, I found it," Zombie tells me one afternoon at the Pyramid of the Sun. He's been digging seven days a week for the past six months. I ask him how confident he is that he's standing on a pyramid. "One million percent," he says.

How can he be so sure? "It's my ancestors," he says. "They talk to me from inside the pyramid. If my heart is beating, I will work." And then he sort of winks.

Zombie is one of roughly 50 locals who've scored a job on the project. With Visoko's old leather factory operating at reduced capacity and unemployment in the region hovering around 40 percent, $20 a day to dig up pyramids isn't a bad gig. Coal miners have been bused in. Osmanagic also estimates that some 5,000 volunteers contributed free labor last year, putting in upwards of 50,000 man-hours. They are a mix of Bosnian expats, archaeology geeks, and wigged-out New Agers. The weekend I was in town, I met two typical enthusiasts: Michelle Fröhlich, a 27-year-old masseuse and Pilates instructor, and Oswald Schwarz, an unemployed 28-year-old with a large Superman tattoo on his right shoulder. They rode a bus for 13 hours from Vienna and were put to work with garden trowels. We drive up the narrow, rocky road to the main dig site on the Pyramid of the Moon, with Zombie riding shotgun. Dozens of people who recognize Osmanagic give us a thumbs-up or wave or snap a photograph. We pass a traditional Bosnian house with a pyramid-shaped roof, which inspires Osmanagic to stop and point out the window. "See, it's in our blood," he says. Zombie turns and makes a triangular shape with his hands, in case I didn't get it.

On the way down, Osmanagic stops to admire the Pyramid of the Sun in the distance. "From here you can clearly see the edges, where north and south meet," he says. It's true, the faces of the pyramid join at a sharp angle. But on the other side, it looks like there's another hill abutting the back side of the pyramid. I ask Osmanagic about it.

"Yes, we think that there is a causeway leading up to the pyramid," he says.

Everything, it seems, is evidence of the pyramids. "It's not a question of whether the pyramids are there or not," he says. "It's a question of whether we'll be able to uncover the pyramids or not."