JOYA DE CEREN – La Libertad – El Salvador
(aka the POMPEII of Central America)
Before the village was abandoned around AD 600 about 200 people lived in this per-Columbian Maya farming village.

The eruption of the Loma Caldera volcano caused 33 feet / 10 meters of debris to settle over the site. The site was remarkably well preserved due to the low temperature of ash and very fast ash-fall, a a thick layer having blanketed the town in the space of a few hours.

Exceptional by uprightness of the culmination of the proof that it gives of regular daily existence in a Mesoamerican cultivating agriculture of the sixth century AD, whichin this social district. It was a pre-Hispanic cultivating network that, similar to Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy, was covered under a volcanic emission about AD 590. Albeit an earlier quake clearly gave inhabitants time to escape, the debris safeguarded their own possessions, from digging tools and bean-filled pots to resting mats and strict things, basically freezing the farming town in time. Due to the extraordinary state of the remaining parts, they provide extreme insights  into the every day lives of the Central American people groups who worked the land around then.

Around AD 200, the focal and western pieces of the domain of the current   Republic of El Salvador were covered underneath thick layers of volcanic debris from the Ilopango fountain of liquid magma. The territory was relinquished and the late pre-Classical Maya social advancement was hindered for a few centuries until the debris layer had endured into ripe soil.

Resettlement didn’t start until around 400, and the Joya de Cerén settlement was established before the finish of the sixth century. As unearthings are still in progress, it isn’t yet evident whether it was a little town or a bigger network. Proof from the structures unearthed so far proposes that the occupants were ranchers.

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