Root Crop Agriculture, Land Use, and Authority Outside of the Ceren Village, El Salvador

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Supported by the National Science Foundation, Dr. Payson Sheets (Anthropology, University of Colorado) and an international team of researchers will conduct archaeological investigations in El Salvador. The team consists of specialists in ancient botany and graduate students from the U.S., and agricultural engineers and archaeology students from El Salvador. The team will follow up on the recent discovery of an agricultural system of the ancient Maya that hitherto was unknown. About 200 meters south of the ancient Maya village of Ceren, very large sloping planting beds were discovered, preserved to an extraordinary degree by the eruption of the Loma Caldera volcanic vent in about AD 600. Test excavations done in 2009, also supported by NSF, encountered many planting beds that had been harvested of the manioc, a root crop, that had been growing there for at least a year. Most of the roots had been removed during harvesting, but some remained and were encountered as hollow spaces, which the researchers cast with dental plaster to preserve them in perpetuity. Some of the beds had been replanted with stem cuttings for the next cycle of growth. Both the stems and the tubers of the ancient Maya were more robust than those grown by peasant farmers in El Salvador today. One goal of the research is to understand the means by which ancient farmers were more successful than present-day farmers in growing manioc. Salvadoran agricultural engineers are essential in helping to explore the possibilities, and three have been proposed so far. (1) Manioc tubers grow best in loose soils, and the ancient planting beds are superior to the present practice of planting in flat fields. (2) Wild and domesticated manioc grows best in semi-arid areas, as too much moisture inhibits growth, so the sloping of the ancient beds facilitates drainage. That is not done by contemporary farmers. (3) The ancient fields were carefully weeded, also a procedure that is not followed today. Because El Salvador is the most crowded Central American country, that passed food self-sufficiency some five decades ago, and is beset by unemployment, it is an ideal location to use ancient successes to improve present-day agricultural practices. Test plots will be initiated by three farmers to compare ancient and traditional contemporary manioc cultivation, to demonstrate and quantify the differences. The research focuses on issues of ancient Maya agriculture. Scholars have long debated whether agriculture was under elite control or influence, or whether it was essentially independent from higher authority. Land-use lines were discovered in 2009 that strictly separated different farmer's plots. Excavations will focus on whether those boundaries were locally established, or emanated from the Ceren village, or possibly from San Andres which is the city under elite control to the south of the fields. And because Ceren receives abundant rainfall, at the moist end of the continuum that manioc can stand, it appears that manioc would have been more suitable for cultivation in dryer areas of the Maya lowlands than at Ceren. Therefore project members are developing multiple durable indicators of manioc cultivation and processing that can be found in archaeological sites that lack the unusual preservation of Ceren.