Public Project Works And Social Integration And Control In A Traditional Society

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Risk perception and natural hazard mitigation traditionally are done by federal agencies in the US and other developed nations. Research, planning, and mitigation have been top-down for many decades. A recent development is to reverse that directionality, embedding hazards planning and mitigation in local communities. Even the American Planning Association in 2014 recognized the importance of granting planning and mitigation authority to local communities. Experiences of other cultures and at other times when they faced disasters can assist hazard planning in contemporary societies. The predominance of scholarship of the ancient Maya in Central America is that the elite controlled everything, a thoroughly top-down picture of the elites running the power hierarchy, economy, society, and religion. Because elite architecture is regularly built out of solid stone, the palaces, pyramids, temples, and tombs preserve better than commoner architecture. And archaeologists have favored the elite architecture and artifacts, leading to the perception of elites as being all-powerful. Archaeologists have spent proportionally little effort in examining the lives of commoners, in part because of poor preservation of their remains. Only rarely is a "clear window" into commoner life discovered, and fortunately one of them is the Ceren site in El Salvador. It is a village exclusively of Maya commoners buried by a sudden volcanic eruption in AD 660. The project has been investigating levels of authority, and has discovered a surprisingly large roadway from the village leading south. Excavations will reveal the beginnings of the roadway in the village, and therefore its functions. Its construction and maintenance evidently were decided within the community. Geophysical instruments will search for the roadway under the 15 feet of volcanic ash that bury it. Ground-penetrating radar and resistivity tomography are the instruments that will be employed. Test pits will confirm and follow the roadway. One apparent branch of the roadway began at Structure 10, the community ritual structure where the harvest ceremony was being held when the eruption began. There was very little time between the initial warning and the arrival of the hot volcanic ash, but what is striking is the emergency evacuation was successful even though it was at night. People literally "headed south" on the roadway, and we have discovered their footprints while they were fleeing. This is an example of local authority successfully reacting quickly to an emergency, without having to wait for a top-down decision from elite authority. The roadway may branch in the village, and lead to a structure that may be at the social or political end, and that building will be excavated in the second year of the project. A team of the finest experts in earthen architecture preservation have been assembled to improve conservation of this World Heritage archaeological site.