Looters have never been a problem at the ruins of Cerén in the lush Zapotitán Valley of El Salvador. It’s not that the security is tight or that the site is especially remote. Cerén is just an hour’s drive from the capital, San Salvador, through hills of impossibly vivid greens and a sky so blue and pure you think you died and woke up in a Cheer commercial. No, it’s more that there isn’t, barring wheelbarrows and fancy German tape measures, anything to loot. No jade figurines, no hammered gold. The artifact list from this Mesoamerican ruin reads something like this: corncob, thatch fragment, carbonized bean.
While there is nothing remarkable about a bean, a 1,400-year-old bean is altogether another matter. Under normal conditions, organic matter in the tropics decomposes in a few months. Unless, as with Cerén, something extraordinary takes place to preserve it.
On a summer evening some 14 centuries ago, in the quiet hours between dinner and sleep, an underground storm began brewing close to Cerén. There must have been some sort of warning, a billow of steam or an ominous trembling, because something convinced the Cerén villagers, just a half mile away, to drop what they were doing and run.
It was a wise decision. Within days, their homes had disappeared, buried beneath 16 feet of scalding wet volcanic ash. The eruption did not merely unleash a slow molten ooze. The pressure of the shifting magma blew open the Earth, forming the volcanic cone, Loma Caldera. On the way to the surface, molten rock hit water, creating a blast of steam and hot ash that broadsided Cerén. Loma Caldera’s tantrum continued for days. There were 14 separate explosions--some raining hail-size stones of ash, some launching 100-pound lava bombs of solidified magma. Cerén was entombed as its inhabitants left it: dinner dishes unwashed, mice in the corn bins, a duck tethered to a post.
And so it remained for some 1,400 years. In 1976, the owners of the land that covered Cerén decided to build a grain silo. In the course of leveling a hillside, a bulldozer operator struck the adobe wall of a Cerén home. The worker called the National Museum in San Salvador, which dispatched an archeologist. On seeing thatched roofing--which normally disintegrates in a decade or so--the archeologist proclaimed the structure to be recent and of no scientific value. Two years and several demolished buildings later, an archeologist and Mesoamerican scholar from the University of Colorado, Payson Sheets, visited the site and began poking around with his trowel. He’d heard that they’d found a number of old pots and a building buried under volcanic ash, which was surprising, since as far as he knew there hadn’t been any local eruptions over the past few centuries. So he thought he’d have a look. Instead of digging up plastic soda bottles and tinfoil, as he expected, he found Mayan pottery in the style of the Classic Period, A.D. 500 to 800. Carbon dating confirmed that Cerén was indeed an ancient site. Excavations began the following year.
