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This month's World Heritage Site...
Joya del Ceren, El Salvador
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.
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.
Some interesting URLs:
http://www.thesalmons.org/lynn/wh-elsal.html
This URL leads to several interesting web sites and articles
that cover a whole range of Maya-related topics:
http://www.archaeolink.com/central_american_archaeology.htm
By Patrick Totty