Ashen riches of a buried village.

Frozen in time under layers al volcanic deposits, El Salvador's Ceren provides a window to doily life in ancient Mesoamerica

In a thriving southern Mesoamerican village, in what is now El Salvador, villagers had become accustomed to the reliable and benign tropical seasonal climate and the fertile volcanic soils. They had successfully fed their families with corn, beans, squash, chilies, root crops, and tree nuts and fruits for many generations. They produced and stored sufficient food during the rainy season to feed themselves during the sixth-month dry season. In addition, each household built multiple, efficient structures with ample space, each with its own purpose, and made basic implements for its own use. Each household also overproduced at least one craft item to use for exchange with other households or for exchange for specialized products at the regional market in the nearby town of San Andres.

The predictable rhythm of dally life came to a catastrophic end, however, when a violent and concentrated volcanic eruption interred the village. Because it came from a buried vent, there were no obvious indications of volcanic risk in the immediate area. A small earthquake immediately preceding the eruption gave some warning, and there were probably steam emissions that indicated the danger was to the north of the village. People fled for their lives, presumably running south, leaving everything behind. But it was dark, and some of the ash was propelled by a wind velocity of between 30 and 120 miles per hour. Villagers apparently had at least a few minutes before the magma came into full contact with water from the Sucio River, which drains the Zapotitan Valley, and the eruption began in earnest. How many would have been able to escape in that time?

This village laid entombed in several feet of ash for fourteen hundred years. In 1976 a bulldozer uncovered a buried building, alerting scientists to a rare discovery: an archaeological bonanza of everyday and valuable items, virtually full inventories of artifacts in household and special-purpose buildings. The Ceren site, called Joya de Ceren by locals, is the best preserved ancient village ever found in the New World.

At the time of the eruption, Ceren had been occupied only for a century or two, by people who had moved back into the Zapotitan Valley and founded the village as a part of the natural and human recovery from the earlier Ilopango volcanic eruption. That earlier eruption, which occurred about 200 A.D., was a massive regional natural disaster, but the Loma Caldera eruption that buried the village of Ceren affected only a couple square miles.

Based on artifact patterns in the households, the eruption evidently occurred after the evening meal was served but before the dirty dishes were washed. No bodies have been found in the village to date; they likely will be found when excavations continue to the south.

The first component of the eruption was a huge scalding cloud of water vapor, volcanic ash, and gasses that hurtled through town, traveling faster than thirty miles per hour. At those speeds it probably overtook the fleeing villagers not far south of their households.

That initial steam explosion was shortly followed by direct airfall of ash with larger lava bombs retaining temperatures over 575 degrees Centigrade. Those bombs punched through all thatch roofs and caught them on fire. Most roofs failed as the third volcanic phase was being deposited on them, both from the weakening from fires and from the increasing overburden of ash accumulation. In succeeding phases, lasting between a few hours and a few days, alternating steam explosions and airfall deposits finally left a total of fourteen layers, effectively sealing the village from human disturbance until its modem-day discovery. Not only did the ash effectively separate the site, but, packed around many organic items such as crops and trees, it preserved them as hollow spaces after the original items decomposed.

Even though research at Ceren is recent, compared to a century or more of study at many Mesoamerican sites, four zones of the ancient community have been uncovered. A civic zone occupies the center of the known site. Facing on a hardpacked and well-maintained plaza is a large structure with walls over six feet high on a large platform. It was evidently used as a public building. Its wails were of solid coursed, or puddled, adobe one foot thick with no internal reinforcements. This contrasts with household architecture, with walls made of earthen "mudded" surfaces on either side of vertical poles and horizontal reinforcements, a wattle-and-daub architecture locally called bajareque. The benches in the front room may have been symbols of authority; certainly a liquid was dispensed from the large ceramic jar on one bench, ladled out by the polychrome hemispherical vessel found sitting on top of the wall above it. It might have been a place of adjudication of disputes within the community.

An almost identically constructed building, only partially excavated, faces the same plaza, from the south. It may have been a storehouse for civic artifacts. South of these two buildings is a large, and probably public, sauna, as it could seat a dozen people inside, and later the same people outside on its ample benches and nearby stone seats. It has solid earthen walls, a stone firebox in the center, and is capped with an engineering marvel: an earthen dome. The histories of architecture claiming that dome construction was developed in the Old World and brought to the New World by the Spanish are in serious error. This building was protected from the elements by a thatch roof. If it was used in a manner like Maya sweatbaths in traditional communities today, sweatbath use combined physical with spiritual cleansing, and often also included healing and herbal medicines.

The second zone of the site is residential. Virtually all of one household and much of two others have been excavated to date. Each household constructed at least three functionally specialized, separate buildings--a domicile, a storehouse, and a kitchen--each spacious and well designed. The domicile, the principal building, was for sleeping and various household crafts and food consumption. The usual construction procedure was to make a low but wide earthen mound to drain rainwater away from the earthen architecture. Then, a formal square platform measuring about twelve-by-twelve feet was built on top, with the floor one to three feet above the surrounding terrain. That was dried and fired, creating a thin zone of hard, oxidized adobe to create a floor. Then, wattle and daub, or bajareque, walls were built and tied tightly into the roof-support beams. This kind of domestic architecture is very earthquake resistant so long as the reinforcing poles remain strong. Grass and pall thatch were used for the roof. (Most thatch roofs were inhabited by at least one mouse, and storehouses and kitchens had about a half dozen.) Earthen columns anchor the comers; they probably were built in situ. There was also a comfortable surrounding porch with a view to the gardens and trees.

Households were surprisingly rich in material culture. In one household alone were found over seventy ceramic vessels ranging from molded miniature pots to large scraped-slip storage vessels to fine polychrome painted hemispherical food serving vessels. There were also numerous polychrome painted gourds, baskets, and other organic containers, as well as abundant chipped stone and ground-stone implements for daily chores.

When a Ceren family needed to obtain a special item, they probably would take some of their surplus craft production, or surplus food, and exchange with another household within the village. Less frequently they might go as far as San Andres. Because the elite at San Andres controlled the obsidian, jade, salt, shell, hematite, cinnabar, and other special items, this exchange system is a key to understanding how the common people supported the elite in the larger centers and obtained the needed elite-controlled goods. For the first time, it is possible for researchers to see how this system of economic integration worked.

As we document these ancient households, with their stores of ceramic vessels within ample structures and abundant, varied foods, we note with sadness that the material standards of life at Ceren were superior to many commoner Central American households today. Part of the reason is the population explosion, as the sheer number of people has exceeded the capacity of their environments and socioeconomic systems.

Associated with the households is the third zone, agriculture. A variety of plants grew in kitchen gardens, including those for medicinal uses, for fine fibers, flowers, and, of course, maize. Cultivated chilies were simply extraordinary--evidence suggests a perennial variety with stems five inches across. Farther from the household were the milpas planted in maize, with three to five plants per locality, growing on top of low ridges. As the eruption apparently occurred in August, the beans had yet to be interplanted. Stalks were broken over in order to stop nutrients from reaching the ears, so that they would dry in the field, providing provisional in-field storage. Also found were tree crops, including nance, guayaba, cacao, and manioc. One garden was exclusively maguey.

Additionally, cotton was grown. A perennial widely cultivated in antiquity, cotton has a deep root system and is a reliable and beneficial plant. Although the fields have not yet been located, the excavations have uncovered two kinds of cotton cloth--one a tight weave, the other gauze. The gauze was first found in a ceramic pot with cacao beans in the bottom, covered by a gauze layer, then topped with a pile of dried chilies.

Two excavated buildings form a religious complex at the eastern edge of the site. Prior to this discovery, archaeologists had no idea that village ceremonialism would have been so well developed to have specially constructed facilities. One of the buildings clearly belonged to a religious association; sacred artifacts were stored inside the two innermost rooms, including a painted deer skull headdress with the string used to attach it to a person's head, shaped deer scapulae, and a large alligator-shaped ceramic vessel full of achiote seeds to make a red paint. The outer room contained ceramic storage and cooking vessels along with considerable amounts of stored food, food-processing areas, and a place for dispensing food to ritual participants. As part of their efforts to convert New World populations to Catholicism, the Spanish exuberantly promoted the adoption of cofradias, or religious associations, by native communities. However, this building indicates that this kind of religious institution was in the New World for centuries prior to the coming of the Europeans. No wonder it continues as a vibrant institution in traditional communities in Mesoamerica today.

The second religious building has very complex architecture with numerous isolated artifacts that appear to be offerings or payments for services. A collection of minerals and two piles of counting beans found inside the building, as well as the elegant lattice window in the front and the back room, indicate that a shaman probably practiced there. The fact that all the artifacts found--grinding stones, metates, donut stones, and spindle whorls--were used exclusively by women, probably indicates that the shaman was female.

Today, research at Ceren is overtly multidisciplinary, with teams of archaeologists working with volcanologists, ethnobotanists, geophysicists, and conservators. Recent geophysical exploration has utilized ground-penetrating radar to map the Classic-period buildings, plazas, drainages, and agricultural areas through the several feet of volcanic ash. But there is much more to do--enough to fill the next one hundred years.

Ceren was declared a World Heritage Site in 1993, joining better-known neighbors like Tikal and Copan. The site has been open to the public since then, with visitors--numbering seven to ten thousand weekly--coming to see how their ancestors lived, filling the pathways to the ancient buildings and the small site museum. There are now a small restaurant, a shop selling books and replica artifacts, a picnic area, and plans to create a living museum with one-to-one scale replicas of ancient buildings. This would be staffed by townspeople crafting ceramics, chipped stone, and agave fiber baskets to demonstrate prehistoric technology and offer high-quality objects for sale to visitors. For unlike grander sites, the wealth and beauty of Ceren is not in its pyramids or hieroglyphics, but in what it reveals to us of everyday life.

Payson Sheets is a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has directed field research at Ceren since 1978, with the exception of 1981-88, during the civil war. He is the author of The Ceren Site: A Prehistoric Village Buried by Volcanic Ash in Central America (Harcourt Brace, 1992). Additional information from an interview with the author, by Teddy Dewalt, published in the Denver Art Museum's News from the Center, September 1997, contributed to this article.