AbstractArchaeologists have relied almost exclusively upon sight among the five human senses to investigate architecture, features, and artifacts. In recent decades researchers have explored how ancient people may have experienced sound, because it was an essential component of lived experiences in ancient societies. Natural and culturally constructed spaces had acoustical properties that enhanced social, political, economic, and ritual events. This article investigates through the lens of archaeoacoustics the large domed earthen temazcal that residents constructed at Joya de Cerén during the seventh century a.d. Its uniqueness at this Classic-period Maya village in El Salvador has attracted considerable interest due to its exceptional preservation and distinct shape. Fortunately, in 2012, architects were able to construct a precise replica for public access. Through the years, visitors entering the replica have noted how significantly their voices were altered, once inside. To evaluate scientifically these observations, two recordings of sound were made and analyzed acoustically. The earthen dome morphology causes “preferred frequencies” to be sustained for a long time, while nonfavored frequencies diminish quickly. The predominant resonance is at 64 hertz, a tone so low that basso profundo singers can barely achieve it. The internal morphology greatly accentuates voices of mature males, but not those with higher pitches, such as mature females or children. The acoustical environment may have been utilized by men for divination, education, curing, rites of passage, and other functions, some of which have not been previously considered. The nature of the lived experience in a socially charged performance space is explored here with new insights regarding how the sweatbath was vital to all in the community.

Spectacular Flops: Game-Changing Technologies That Failed. MICHAEL BRIAN SCHIFFER. 2019. Eliot Werner Publications, Clinton Corners, New York. xii + 308 pp. $32.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-9898249-9-6. - Volume 86 Issue 2

A Salvadoran bulldozer encountered some architecture and artifacts so well preserved that it was assumed to be recent. I examined the site in 1978 and dated the thatch roofing to 1400 BP. With collaborations of volcanologists, I have investigated the Maya village for 42 years. The eruption of Loma Caldera volcano preserved the village and its landscape extraordinarily. Food is still intact in ceramic vessels, earthen buildings are preserved, and plants are intact in gardens and fields, in spite of being in a tropical wet environment. I nominated the Cerén site to the UNESCO World Heritage list, and it was accepted, as it is the best preserved ancient village in the Americas. Every season we publish our results in English and in Spanish and make them widely available. Local high school students in the past two decades are giving reenactment public performances that are highly accurate about the precursors of phreatomagmatic eruptions, the eruptions themselves, and proper emergency behavior. The result is a widespread awareness and preparedness that is greater than I could achieve with a plethora of scientific publications. I suggest that volcanologists and archaeologists consider supporting similar performances in hazardous areas, to improve risk perception and salutary emergency behavior.

Volcanic eruptions and interactions with the landforms and products these yield, are a constant feature of human life in many parts of the world. Seen over long timespans, human–volcano interactions become stratified in sedimentary archives containing eruptive products and archaeological remains. This review is concerned with charting the overlapping territory of volcanology and archaeology and attempts to plot productive routes for further conjoined research. We define archaeological volcanology as a field of study that brings together incentives, insights, and methods from both volcanology and from archaeology in an effort to better understand both past volcanism as well as past cultural change, and to improve risk management practices as well as the contemporary engagement with volcanism and its products. There is an increasing appreciation that understanding these human impacts and manifold human-volcano interactions requires robust multi-, inter- or even trans-disciplinary collaboration. Our review is written in the hope of providing a clearinghouse resource that (i) maps the many forms of past human-volcano interactions, (ii) provides study design templates for how to integrate archaeological perspectives into investigations of past volcanism, and (iii) makes suggestions for how the insights gained from such an archaeological volcanology can be integrated into reducing contemporary and future vulnerability amongst at-risk communities.

The Late Classic Maya village of Joya de Ceren's extraordinary preservation by the Loma Caldera eruption circa 660 CE allows for a unique opportunity to study ancient Mesoamerican landscape management and agricultural practices. Various fruit trees, annual and root crops, fiber producers and other useful plants were cultivated within the village center, creating productive house-lot gardens. Extensive agricultural outfields of maize, manioc, squash, common beans, and numerous weedy species also have been documented through intensive paleoethnobotanical recovery methods and demonstrate the practice of multi-cropped or polyculture farming during Prehispanic times. The assorted array of economically useful species reveals the diversity of foodstuffs readily accessible to the inhabitants on a daily basis that were not simply the annual crops planted within the outfields. The long history of paleoethnobotanical research at this exceptionally preserved site provides the opportunity to not only understand what plant species the ancient inhabitants of this village utilized in their daily lives but also how the villagers perceived, managed, and manipulated their landscape in order to ensure a diverse and nutritional diet.

Service obligations represent an important form of part-time household occupational specialization for past Mesoamerican societies. Using the case of the Cerén village, El Salvador, this chapter explores different service activities of several households and correlates them with unequal opportunities for wealth and status.

Ilopango volcano (El Salvador) erupted violently during the Maya Classic Period (250-900 CE) in a densely-populated and intensively-cultivated region of the southern Maya realm, causing regional abandonment of an area covering more than 20,000 km(2). However, neither the regional nor global impacts of the Tierra Blanca Joven (TBJ) eruption in Mesoamerica have been well appraised due to limitations in available volcanological, chronological, and archaeological observations. Here we present new evidence of the age, magnitude and sulfur release of the TBJ eruption, establishing it as one of the two hitherto unidentified volcanic triggers of a period of stratospheric aerosol loading that profoundly impacted Northern Hemisphere climate and society between circa 536 and 550 CE. Our chronology is derived from 100 new radiocarbon measurements performed on three subfossil tree trunks enveloped in proximal TBJ pyroclastic deposits. We also reassess the eruption magnitude using terrestrial (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras) and near-shore marine TBJ tephra deposit thickness measurements. Together, our new constraints on the age, eruption size (43.6 km(3) Dense Rock Equivalent of magma, magnitude = 7.0) and sulfur yield (similar to 9-90 Tg), along with Ilopango's latitude (13.7 degrees N), squarely frame the TBJ as the major climate-forcing eruption of 539 or 540 CE identified in bipolar ice cores and sourced to the tropics. In addition to deepening appreciation of the TBJ eruption's impacts in Mesoamerica, linking it to the major Northern Hemisphere climatic downturn of the mid-6th century CE offers another piece in the puzzle of understanding Eurasian history of the period. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Scholarly interest in disasters can be attributed to their ability to produce an array of dramatic impacts and responses. As disasters have gained attention, notably within anthropology and archaeology, our understanding of these events has become considerably more nuanced. Instead of the early cause‐and‐effect scenarios, disasters are now recognized as multidimensional processes that unfold over various geographic, sociocultural, and temporal time spans. Disasters produce not only negative consequences but also create opportunities for innovation.

The Classic Maya village of Joya de Ceren is extraordinary in that it was preserved by volcanic ash following the Loma Caldera volcanic eruption. The excellent preservation conditions offer a unique opportunity to understand plants in their primary use contexts, and to examine geospatial relationships between plantsboth living and curatedin gardens, fields and households. The geospatial analysis of plantscapes' at Ceren presented here provides a template for interpreting botanical resource use and management at other contemporaneous Maya sites, and can contribute to a broader understanding of the use of space, plants and agriculture in the past.

Impressive progress has been made in understanding the complex interrelationships between human societies and volcanic activity since the publication of the book Volcanic Activity and Human Ecology in 1979. That progress was achieved by advances in methods, techniques, instrumentation, theory, and in greater integration of scholars in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities in research programs. Precision in dating has improved, but it often remains challenging to go beyond discovering close correlations of volcanic and cultural phenomena into documenting causal relationships. Using historical data can compellingly resolve this problem, as exemplified by two articles in this issue. Technological sophistication not even dreamed of 38 years ago, when the book was written, can chemically characterize cryptotephra of infinitesimal size in ice cores, with sulfur, and date them precisely. The big eruptions of the past few millennia caused cold and drought, often resulting in starvation, disease, and failure of confidence in religious and political systems. Cultural and social theory provide rich grounding for exploring people's sense of place, homeland, and desire to return after having to seek refuge at a distance. Volcanic stresses can have creative aspects, as societies embed knowledge of the hazards into oral history and cosmology from their experiences, and thus are more prepared when the hazard turns into a disaster.

The intellectual, artistic, and architectural accomplishments of Maya elites during the Classic period were extraordinary, and evidence of elite activities has preserved well in the archaeological record. A centuries-long research focus on elites has understandably fostered the view that they controlled the economy, politics, and religion of Maya civilization. While there has been significant progress in household archaeology, unfortunately the activities, decisions, and interactions of commoners generally preserve poorly in the archaeological record. Therefore, it has been challenging to understand the sociopolitical economy of commoners, and how it related—or did not relate—to elite authority. The exceptional volcanic preservation of the site of Cerén, El Salvador, provides a unique opportunity to explore the degree to which elites controlled or influenced commoner life. Was society organized in a top-down hierarchy in which elites controlled everything? Or did commoners have autonomy, and thus the authority to decide quotidian, seasonal, and annual issues within the village? Or was there a mixture of different loci of authority within the village and the region? Research at Cerén is beginning to shed some light on the sociopolitical economy within the community and in relation to elites in the Zapotitan valley. A domain in which there was considerable commoner-elite interaction in the Cerén area was the marketplace. Elites and their attached specialists provided products, and commoners decided which marketplace they would attend to exchange their items. Evidence from Cerén also suggests that there were numerous other domains of authority within the community that had no detectable control or influence from outside. For instance, people in the village decided what crafts or specialized agricultural products to produce as surplus to be exchanged within the community for different products from other households. Cerén community members acted independently as individuals, as households, or in other domains within the community. Understanding the multiple layers of authority at Cerén sheds light on the sociopolitical organization in one non-elite Classic period Maya community.