Work at the End of the Rainy Season at Cihuatán

6AM on the Western Ceremonial Center and the rising sun starts to burn away the early morning fog.

September and October (into November) were busy months at Cihuatán. Karen was in residence and, it still being rainy, spent her time herding sherds from the Acropolis excavations. She was joined by Edgar Cabrera, a local archaeology student. We have an enormous amount of analysis to do, not just ceramics, but stone tools and other remains. We made some inroads, but Karen is going back in January and February to work on analysis as well as on the excavations.

Our lab is on the back veranda, which is enclosed in cyclone fencing and secured by locked doors. Here we clean, number, sort, draw, photograph, and analyze artifacts. Archaeology involves a great deal of record keeping, on paper, with visual means and, of course, with computers. On the left is a pile of sherds waiting sorting and recording on the forms. To the right Salvadoran archaeology student Edgar Cabrera Palacios works on ceramics analysis. And, yes, it was very hot that day.

Dr. Geoffrey McCafferty from the University of Calgary and Srta. Sara Kraudy from the Departamento del Patrimonio Cultural of the Instituto Nicaraguense de Cultura came out to see our pottery. They were in town for the congress and we had a good time with them. Here Paul shows them how tall our indigo bushes have grown.

An exciting find was this Banderas Polychrome potsherd painted with a representation of Ek Chuah (Yacatecuhtli in Nahua), the god of traders. You can read our publication on the find.

Because the rains were tapering off (this was before Hurricane Ida brought disastrous storms and flooding to El Salvador), we also initiated a consolidation program that was much needed. A 76m. section of the north wall of the Western Ceremonial Center had been excavated by Gloria Hernández in the mid-1970s. No notes and only one photograph remain of that excavation, but Niña Gloria apparently simply cleared fallen rock and left it in piles on either side of the wall. No attempt at consolidation was made. In the intervening years rock thieves came in with trucks and stole some of the stone. During the civil conflict of the 1980s Cihuatán was pretty much abandoned because much of the conflict between the army, various groups of guerrillas, and individual initiative violence centered in the Aguilares region and the adjacent Volcán de Guazapa and western hills around El Paisnal. Trees grew up and covered the ceremonial center and rooted into the wall, forcing the rocks to fair and opening cracks where more plants and snakes and small animals to find homes. Finally, Hurricane Mitch hit El Salvador and the torrential rains caused the cyclopean stone northwest corner to collapse, further weakening the wall.

We decided that the time had come to either consolidate the excavated section of wall since much of it was on the verge of total collapse. Our consolidation involved examining very carefully the remaining intact areas of the wall, using these as guides to put back the original stone, using stabilized earth mortar. We discovered that the wall had had a low ledge on the interior, perhaps to permit people inside to look over the wall (thanks to stone robbery and the lack of notes, we have little idea of the original height of the stone wall nor if there was originally a wooden stockade (palenque) on top of it. We hope to have the opportunity to conduct some experiments in areas less disturbed by thieves to try to get some better idea of the original height, but this must wait until next season.

The exterior of the wall was also stepped, suggesting that this wall served as a device to delimit the sacred precincts and was not really a defensive structure. Similar delimiting walls are known at other Early Postclassic Mesoamerican sites, such as at Chichén Itzá, where a low earthen and stone wall delimits the main temple plaza area (it is not really visible, not having been excavated and most of it is covered with vegetation.) Pastor Gálvez, Antonio Castillo, Arturo López, Rutilio Gozález, Miguel Angel Zelaya, Carlos Flores and Geovanny Miranda all worked on the wall and did an excellent job. It all looks very new right now, but soon will have lichen and small plants growing and will simply look, well, less ruinous.

Here is the north wall before we began work. The collapsed corner is on the left with the adjacent piece of collapsing wall in the middle, while a long view down the wall to the west shows how slumped the entire wall had become.

First the fallen stone was cleared away, forming small piles for each separate collapse. Then the stones were replaced, using stabilized earth mortar to replace the original plain earth (which has dissolved over the ensuing 1000 years). Miguel Angel Zelaya mixes the stabilized earth.

Carlos Flores, Geovanny Miranda and Antonio Castillo discuss what next is needed on the north side of the wall, while Pastor Gálvez and Arturo López work on the top of the wall while Alejandro Teyba, our student from Seville, looks on. The park remained open during all this work, of course, so visitors would come over to see what was going on or, like this pair, would simply ignore the workers.

Trees had grown into the wall and, although we had cut them some years ago, their trunks remained. It was necessary to take them all out as part of the repair work. Paul and Carlos discuss what is to be done and then Carlos removed this trunk, with great effort. The final photograph shows the kind of damage a tree trunk does to a wall.

The collapsed section is now completely restored with a strong new corner of the original huge boulders. It all looks very new and incongruous now, but in a few months, when plants and lichen begin to grow, it will look very nice indeed and will not continue to collapse. We plan to plant Pitahaya plants (a blooming cactus that flourishes on the site) along the top to discourage schoolchildren from running along the top and damaging the wall again.

Karen continued her landscaping projects with Carlos’s help, planting purple hibiscus and a basil bush at the front of the museum building. She also got a huge potted palm to decorate the veranda in front of the laboratory.

Carlos plants a basil bush out front. The shelves to be repainted are behind him. The new, improved, veranda now has a screen of tall plants and these handsome purple flowers are in front of the site museum.

Efforts this season were impeded by problems with the cistern and the installation of a pump in the newly cleaned well. However, for over a week we existed on barrels of water trucked in by Antonio and his helpers.

The big plastic jars of water in the shower led to our having a new occupant: Foncho. Karen came into the bathroom one evening and there he was, swimming in a red plastic basin of water she had left in the shower. Attempts to relocate Foncho were unsuccessful. Toads have a homing device and his was set on our shower!

Kique is still living on the back veranda, in the lab. He has been joined by Mrs. Kique and they are soon—if Mrs. Kique can figure out either how to burrow in the tiles or that she has to go out into the garden to lay her eggs—to be the proud parents of 100 or some toadlets.

The season’s bugs were ferocious. Karen and Alejandro Teyba (our visiting student from Seville) both got badly infected mosquito bites and Paul ended up with dengue fever again. We also had determined assaults by praying mantises who wanted to hunt perched on the lamp on the table (it is unnerving trying to work with a mantis hunting right next to you) and, of course, the season’s scorpion, here cut in half as Karen does not like scorpions in her bathroom.

The storeroom was a disaster area and bats had invaded. A few nights’ of the light on steadily got rid of Drac and family and then we took everything out, cleaned up the dead insects and bat detritus, took the shelves out to repaint them, and now we have a clean, organized and salubrious storage.

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The sheep continue their duties as excellent grass cutters and baby producers. Our herd is up to 23, despite losing one sheep to disease and a couple to poachers.

Our growing herd of sheep are very good at trimming the grass on platforms. Here they are cleaning up P-20 on the West Terrace.

Chuleta at age 10 minutes and 4 weeks later. Sheep are not very smart and his mother had dropped him in the middle of the plaza, in the blazing sun. Raúl rescued him and took him back to the safety and shade of the corral where Chuleta yelled until Mom came running to feed him.

Karen and her friend Jeanette Washington took a Sunday excursion to Perquín, one of the hot spots of the civil war of nearly 20 years ago and now a tourist attraction on the “ruta de paz.” Here are a few shots from their trip.

: Roaring down the Panamerican highway to San Miguel we got behind this ambulatory chair pile. There are two guys in the back too! We stopped to buy bananas and watermelons from this lady, who has a stand on the highway.

The road to Perquin turns off at San Miguel, where the volcano (San Miguel or Chaparrisque) dominates the view. This area is full of cinder cones (extinct) and ash and lava flows. Here a heavy ancient ash flow has eroded to imitate tower karst.

Perquin is high in the mountains. The area is dominated by pine forest and is cool. These photographs were taken from the Perkin Lenka restaurant, where we had lunch. We got to the town too late to visit the war museum, but it still was an interesting trip and a chance to cool off!

FUNDAR has renounced its job of administering the archaeological parks of El Salvador. We hope to continue administering Cihuatán and to continue our excavations on the Acropolis in 2010. We are not in the least worried about the hysteria about the faux event of the supposed turnover of the Maya calendar in 2012. See the movie and read the excellent article about why this is so silly in the November Archaeology magazine!

Work Continues on the Western Terraces of the Acropolis

A helicopter flight over the Acropolis reveals the extent of the excavations. Some of the stairway up to the South Plaza has been cleared (left). On the right the lower terraces extend to the area of the excavation, then there is a wall and, apparently, another stair leading to the Acropolis from the west. The excavations farther up the Acropolis are semi-filled in (plastic and earth) for protection as they are into the Burned Palace. Our thanks to helicopter pilot Rogelio Peña for an interesting morning.

In February and March we reinitiated excavations on the Western Terraces of the Acropolis. Excavation centered on a structure on the fourth (or perhaps fifth, terrace ... we can’t be sure because the lower area was bulldozed in the 1970s by the then landowner). There may be a very low terrace, almost at plaza level. Above it is a clay terrace, also low, and above that a stone cobble-paved terrace (probably the foundation for a well built clay floor), then there is a partly paved terrace with flat volcanic tuff slabs and one, maybe two, small altar-like structures, and above that the structure which we are still excavating. It is the cobble-paved terrace at whose base were found the Tlaloc effigy, the water jars, the incense burners, and other special purpose vessels. It is now beginning to look like these were thrown to the west by the people who destroyed Cihuatán, in keeping with their practice of breaking incense burners and other ritual items on the west side of structures. The small altar is badly destroyed, but preserves a talud and some front steps.

The excavations in February, seen from the Western Ceremonial Center. We reinterred the lowest, destroyed, terrace and sowed grass on it for protection.

A panorama from above of the excavations in August. The pavement and ruined altar are clearly visible.

The structure above it is entered via a baffled door from the terrace (which seems to support at least one other structure to the south) and then changes to a large stair up into the plaza bordered by three temples. Entering the doorway, you come into a small, walled, patio with a raised structure in the north and a well-built drain in the western wall. Materials found in this structure included the remains of elaborate polychrome ceramics and the mandible and humerus of a human being, stuck in the drain itself.

The terraces on the south lead up to this plaza surrounded by relatively high temple platforms. Looking south there are more structures in the dry grass and brush, including a second pyramid on a giant terrace and a number of long rectangular platforms.

The building had a flat roof of wood, adobe, and stone slabs. This collapsed onto the floor and we have just begun to remove some of it in the northern sector. Our first concern was to see how long the building was. Excavating in 4m squares, as we have throughout the Acropolis, we followed the western wall to the north. After 40 m the building ends in a sturdy east-west wall with a patio and other structures to the north of it. We have now followed this east-west wall for 16 m. We think that continuing the excavation to the east will show that the structure abuts the wall that supports the highest terrace, where the Burned Palace is located.

One of the most interesting features of this enormous hall is that the west edge of the roof was bordered with almenas, large hollow stepped ceramic ornaments. The almenas at Cihuatán are identical to those shown in the early colonial picture of a palace in the Lienzo de Tlaxcala. Such almenas have not been reported archaeologically before, perhaps because, being broken in small pieces, archaeologists did not take any interest in them; they are not painted nor otherwise adorned usually. The almenas lie in heaps of large pieces, evidently broken in situ along the western wall, almost as if they had been removed and deliberately broken. We are measuring and counting them, having left all heaps in place, and we hope to hire a conservator to piece them together. The identification of this architectural grouping as a royal palace was confirmed by the finding of first a partial tuff disk and then a complete one. In the codices palaces are always identified by their disk adornment, usually along the visible edge of the flat roof.

Here Pastor Gávez excavates a group of broken almenas.

The entire body of an almena features in one group.

The whole disk, just as it was being cleared off.

Excavations are continuing, but will be closed down when the rains start in a few weeks. The buildings, floors, and piles of almena fragments are quite fragile and we do not want to jeopardize them. The excavations are covered at night and weekends with plastic, which is held in place by large rocks and, at the end of the season, will be covered until excavation begins again. The Acropolis is not open to visitors, so disturbance, except by snakes, toads, and small beasts, is not a problem. Another reason for the plastic is that we were working during cane harvest and farmers here burn their fields just before cutting. The air was filled with falling cinders and the site area has been damaged by fires that were uncontrolled.

The giant ceiba is growing out of an ancient platform. This view is looking south from the north end of the excavations, which are covered in plastic.

A closeup of the plastic, here covering the wall and small platform on the north end of the large structure.

This particular fire did not invade the site, although one some weeks before ran up onto the Acropolis and killed one of the few remaining ceiba trees there.

Animal life continues unabated. Karen moved into the site house, unaware that she had moved into the territory of a toad. The toad was living under the flower pots in front, but came through the site house (toads can slide under doors) to get to the tubs of muddy water and soaking sherds on the back veranda. These, according to the toad--named Quique after a notorious artifact dealer--were his private swimming pools. Unfortunately, Karen's occupancy put obstacles into Quique's nightly migration and, after a fair number of middle-of-the-night clashes, when Quique knocked things over and made an ungodly racket, a truce was reached. Quique moved to the back veranda, where he he lives under a pile of sherd sacks and is close to his tubs and the insects that frequent the area because there is water (it is summer and not raining at all). Last heard from he was advertising nightly for a lady friend. Toads are a fact of life in the country, although most do not live in houses. The handsome fellow on the right, looking a bit perplexed, came hopping into our excavations one night. We relocated him to a suitable location, far from the dangers of the excavation.

Meanwhile the sheep continue their appointed task of mowing the lawn on the pyramid and platforms. The scrawny, but cute, skunk appeared from under the plastic which protects the excavations. Unfortunately, before he left, he grazed Pastor with his perfume.

Another natural event was the blooming of the giant ceiba tree in the now plaza between the Western Ceremonial Center and the Acropolis. It then proceeded to let out its seeds, covering the Acropolis, and our excavations, with silky kapok puffs.

The ceiba tree is covered with seed pods which open and let the silky puffs drift away.

Closeup of a seed puff.

As part of our educational program at the archaeological parks, we are putting native plants, especially those which are not being grown much any more, into the decorative landscaping. At Joya de Cerén we have a number of crops grown by the ancient Maya, including this cacao (chocolate) grove, which is bearing nicely. It is bearing so nicely, in fact, that we are thinking of looking for a chocolate processor for our genuine “archaeological” chocolate.

Cacao flowers and bears throughout the year. This young tree is covered with green pods.

Ripe pods on a tree in the same grove.

At Cihuatán, where the site is located on a rocky ridge with the ancient agricultural lands in the valley (and in other hands), we have planted quequexte (malanga, also known as dasheen or coco yam, Xanthasoma spp.) in pots in front of the site house. Wild quequexte grows along the small río Izcanal between the main site area and the highway. Because Cihuatán is the only Mesoamerican site where indigo has been identified in precolumbian contexts by a trained paleobotanist, we also are growing indigo (Indigofera suffructosa var.) on the West Terrace. At this time of year it is dry and with seeds. It is doing very well indeed. The cacao that we planted at Cihuatán, largely because the same paleobotanist identified chocolate at the site, isn’t doing so well. We really ought to plant it down along the río Izcanal too, but those lands are in private hands.

And finally, Don Tilo rescued this poor bunny and his sibling. Mom Bunny had dug her burrow near the snack bar (a wise choice as the area is out of foot traffic and is fenced, meaning fewer predators). But Don Tilo went to water the newly planted jacaranda tree near the burrow and inadvertently flooded it. Hearing bunny distress noises, Tilo rescued the babies and kept them in his hat with a bandana over them until the burrow dried out and they could go home.

Improvements at Joya de Cerén

At Joya de Cerén the problem of burrowing birds and small animals has finally been resolved with the installation of fine metal netting around Area 1. The netting will keep out birds, foxes, armadillos, etc. all of which have been a real problem in terms of protecting the ruins. The netting is virtually invisible from inside the structures.

More Work on the Acropolis

Older news stories about the project.

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