The Cerén archaeological site, sometimes called “Joya de Cerén” in Spanish, was a small Maya village in what is now El Salvador (Sheets, 2006). It was founded by immigrants from the north as part of the recovery from the cataclysmic disaster of the Ilopango volcanic eruption (Dull et al., 2001) that probably occurred in AD 536 (Dull et al., 2010). The immigrants settled on the bank of the Rio Sucio and began farming maize, beans, squash, chiles (Lentz et al., 1996), and manioc (Sheets et al., 2007). About 200 people lived there until a nearby volcanic vent erupted – the Loma Caldera event of ca. AD 660 – and buried it deeply under layers of volcanic ash.
Four households have been at least partially excavated, and each household built three separate structures: a domicile for sleeping and daytime activities, a storehouse (Figure 1), and a kitchen (Sheets, 2006), all built of wattle-and-daub, a highly earthquake-resistant architecture. Each household possessed about 70 complete pottery...
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Bibliography
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Sheets, P. (2017). Cerén. In: Gilbert, A.S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geoarchaeology. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4409-0_75
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