Background to my trip: Part 2 (the summary of previous work)

 Here is a VERY brief summary of our work at Joya de Ceren to provide a little context for what we are doing here this year.  You can also go back to the beginning of this blog (from 2011) and read through my posts from the field while we were excavating at Ceren last year to get an idea of what we found and an idea of the research process. This is will just help you make sense of what we are doing this year!


Our research in El Salvador this year is based on some of our archaeological studies at Joya de Ceren in the past few years.  A little context to our research... the site I work at is called Joya de Ceren and is a Maya community that was buried by volcanic ash around A.D. 630 (Sheets 2002).  The eruption of the Loma Caldera vent (then it was just a fissure that opened in the ground surface) opened and as magma came to the surface it contact a river and resulted in layers of fine ash coating all of the surfaces present at that time.  So, the archaeological site is now buried beneath multiple meters of volcanic ash and the result is extraordinary preservation of the archaeological record. We have preserved earthen buildings, artifacts, and agricultural plants. Last field season we also encountered an earthen sacbe (road).

Earthen Ceren Sacbe (road) discovered in 2011 fieldseason

Plants and agricultural are extremely difficult to study in the archaeological record and are often limited to a few carbonized plant remains if you are very lucky and microbotanical evidence (pollen, phitoliths, etc.). At Ceren, the nature of the volcanic ash packed around plants in such a way as to preserve their impressions in the surrounding ash.  While the plants themselves have largely decomposed, their forms in the ash create a mold. Thus, as we excavate down to the Ceren horizon we encounter hollow spaces in the ash above the site (where ash layers surrounded plants during the eruption).  We fill those hollow spaces with plaster, allow it to set, and then excavate these. The result is the ability to see the plants that were being grown at this site approximately 1400 years ago.  





In 2007 we first discovered large manioc beds planted at Ceren. Manioc is a root crop that can be eaten, used to make flour, beer, or even a glue-like substance. It was suspected that the ancient Maya might have used root crops, such as manioc (Bronson 1966), however little evidence for root crops survived to the present day. Root crops do not have the same amount of pollen or microbotanical evidence that survives the archaeological record.

Me excavating the first discovered manioc beds at Ceren (2007)

Manioc Plant showing tubers that grow beneath the surface

(from: https://rauman.wikispaces.com/cassava)

When we first found this beds, we had never seen anything like them in the archaeological record. In later projects (2009 and 2011) we realized that the Ceren village was intensively farming manioc, much more so than we ever suspected.  We have yet to identify exactly how much manioc they were growing but interestingly all that we have found thus far was harvested around the same time. That is literally tons of manioc tubers that would have to be used or processed within a few days to avoid rot.
There is no way without the eruption of the Loma Caldera vent that we would ever have known that they were growing manioc or in such large quantities.  We know that maize, beans, and squash were very important in Mesoamerica and particularly the Maya area, but this research and other research on the topic of agricultural in this region, has demonstrated that those three crops were just a part of a much broader agricultural system.