This month's World Heritage Site

Joya del Ceren, El Salvador  

Joya del Ceren -Temple

Travelers seeking Mayan ruins in Mexico and Central America have no shortage of places they can visit to view mighty temples and cityscapes. But often lost in the wonder of gazing at the prodigious results of Mayan architecture and construction skills is a sense of what every day life was like for the great majority of Maya who were not priests or officials.

Fortunately, in El Salvador, there is a pre-Columbian Mayan farming village, Joya del Ceren (“Jewel of the Ceren”) that can give visitors a wonderful sense of the scale and organization of quotidian life among the Maya. Joya del Ceren, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, has none of the vast scale of Calakmul or Tikal. Its adobe houses, communal baths and public structures were all built at a far smaller, more prosaic scale.

Joya del Ceren - Sauna

Because Joya del Ceren’s building materials were susceptible to erosion and quick decay, it took ash from a nearby volcano that erupted around 600 A.D. to bury the village and protect it from the elements. Archaeologists believe its inhabitants were able to flee the eruption in time, so the story of Joya del Ceren’s fate is generally a happy one at both ends of the time scale.

In their haste to escape, the villagers left behind utensils, textiles, food, ceramics, furniture and all of the other accouterments of daily life. The village lay hidden until 1976 when it was discovered by Payson Sheets, an anthropology professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Sheets almost immediately began excavating the site, a process that has continued ever since.

The subspecialty involved in the excavation here is called “household archaeology.” In many ways the excavation at Joya del Ceren resembles the process of excavation at Pompeii and Herculaneum, the two Roman cities buried under Vesuvius’ ashes to which the Mayan town has often been compared.

- Patrick Totty