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Archaeologists have long encountered evidence of natural disasters through excavation and stratigraphy. In Surviving Sudden Environmental Change, case studies examine how eight different past human communities—ranging from Arctic to equatorial regions, from tropical rainforests to desert interiors, and from deep prehistory to living memory—faced and coped with such dangers.

Archaeologists have long encountered evidence of natural disasters through excavation and stratigraphy. In Surviving Sudden Environmental Change, case studies examine how eight different past human communities-ranging from Arctic to equatorial regions, from tropical rainforests to desert interiors, and from deep prehistory to living memory-faced and coped with such dangers. Many disasters originate from a force of nature, such as an earthquake, cyclone, tsunami, volcanic eruption, drought, or flood. But that is only half of the story; decisions of people and their particular cultural lifeways are the rest. Sociocultural factors are essential in understanding risk, impact, resilience, reactions, and recoveries from massive sudden environmental changes. By using deep-time perspectives provided by interdisciplinary approaches, this book provides a rich temporal background to the human experience of environmental hazards and disasters. In addition, each chapter is followed by an abstract summarizing the important implications for today's management practices and providing recommendations for policy makers. Publication supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

On an August evening around AD 600, residents of the Cerén village in the Zapotitán Valley of what is now El Salvador were sitting down to their nightly meal when ground tremors and loud steam emissions warned of an impending volcanic eruption. The villagers fled, leaving their town to be buried under five meters of volcanic ash and forgotten until a bulldozer uncovered evidence of the extraordinarily preserved town in 1976. The most intact Precolumbian village in Latin America, Cerén has been called the Pompeii of the New World. This book and its accompanying CD-ROM and website (ceren.colorado.edu) present complete and detailed reports of the excavations carried out at Cerén since 1978 by a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, ethnographers, volcanologists, geophysicists, botanists, conservators, and others. The book is divided into sections that discuss the physical environment and resources, household structures and economy, special buildings and their uses, artifact analysis, and topical and theoretical issues. As the authors present and analyze Cerén’s houses and their goods, workshops, civic and religious buildings, kitchen gardens, planted fields, and garbage dumps, a new and much clearer picture of how commoners lived during the Maya Classic Period emerges. These findings constitute landmark contributions to the anthropology and archaeology of Central America.

The Classic-period households of the Ceren village in the southeastern periphery of the Maya area provisioned themselves by one of three different economies. (1) Household members produced many items for intrahousehold use, including architecture, food, and some artifacts, with no input from outside. (2) Each household produced some commodity in excess of what they needed for their internal consumption, by means of part-time specialization, and they used this for exchange with other households within the village or nearby. This is termed the horizontal or village economy. The commodities included craft items such as groundstone tools and painted gourds as well as agricultural specialities such as agave for fiber. (3) Each household obtained distant exotic items, such as obsidian tools, jade axes, and polychrome serving ceramics, by exchanging their household surplus commodities in elite centers. In this paper, this is called the vertical economy. The choices available to commoner households in negotiating economic transactions in various elite centers gave them economic power and could have the effect of constraining the elite in setting exchange equivalencies. This is quite different from the view from the top of the pyramid which generally depicts commoners as the exploited class at the bottom of a powerful political and economic hierarchy. Si uno pudiera lleva a cabo un análisis de los artefactos de todas las viviendas de los sitios de la periferia de la región maya durante la época clásica, sería posible ver lo que parece el poder fuerte de la élite. Si el énfasis está en bienes de prestigio como, por ejemplo, implementos de obsidiana, cerámica policromada o hachas de jade, es obvio que los miembros de cada vivienda tenía que hacer intercambios con la élite para conseguir estas clases de objetos, ya que la élite controlaba la distribución de tales objetos. En este sentido, es claro que la economía política era importante durante el clásico. Sin embargo, también hay que examinar la obtención de bienes de prestigio en cada vivienda para entender la economía total. El sitio de Joya de Cerén, en el valle de Zapotitan de El Salvador, era una aldea de unos 100 habitantes del período clásico medio. Estuvo sepultado por unos cinco metros de ceniza volcánica de la erupción de Loma Caldera. Los habitantes se dieron a la fuga y no tuvieron tiempo de trasladar sus pertenencias. Casi todos los objetos que se encuentran en excavaciones del sitio se hallan en su lugar original de uso o almacenaje. La mayoría de los artefactos orgánicos están muy bien conservados. Por eso, tenemos la oportunidad de estudiar el inventario completo de los objetos dejados en cada vivienda. En este caso, vemos que los artefactos que procedieron del intercambio con la élite son importantes pero representan un proporción pequeña del inventario de cada vivienda. Además de la economía política, hay otros dos sistemas económicos en que cada vivienda participaba. Uno es interno; es decir que cada vivienda construía sus propios edificios, tenía jardines y milpas suficientes para proveerse de comida y producía varios artefactos para su propio uso. El otro sistema económico no tuvo nada que ver con la élite. Este sistema se trata del intercambio dentro del sitio. Cada vivienda excavada producía objetos de su especialización y los hizo en cantidades excesivos a lo que se requería para su propio uso. Se supone que el exceso se usaba para el intercambio local. La Vivienda I especializó en la producción de artefactos de piedra pulida como metates, manos y piedras perforadas (morteros). La Vivienda 2 se dedicaba a la producción de las calabazas pintadas. No sabemos en que especializó la Vivienda 3 ya que sólo hemos excavado una parte de su cocina. La Vivienda 4 se dedicaba al cultivo de agave de cantidades grandes para hacer pita. Producían agave suficiente para una docena de viviendas. Aparentamente, se trata de un sistema de intercambio horizontal, fuera del alcance de la élite. Los habitantes de Joya de Cerén y otras aldeas del valle pudieron decidir si querían ir a San Andrés u otro centro élite para adquirir ciertos objetos. También tenían la opción de adquirir objetos y productos de otras aldeas en la región y pensamos que de esta manera los campesinos tenían el poder de afectar los precios de los objetos. Una conclusión principal de este trabajo es que los campesinos podían tomar decisiones y por medio de sus decisiones, afectaban la economía regional del valle de Zapotitan en tiempos precolombinos.

Detailed analyses of ancient stone tools, or lithic analyses, were performed by archaeologists as early as the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe, the Near East, and North America. However, it was not until the past thirty years that lithic analysis became a standard part of prehistoric research in Mesoamerica. The reasons for this belated beginning involve the dominant humanities-art history orientation toward much of Mesoamerican archaeology prior to the 1960s; the extraordinary richness, complexity, and accessibility of other cultural components (particularly architecture, hieroglyphics, ceramics, and sculpture); and the lack of quantitative dating techniques. The paucity of reliable dating techniques until quite recently led archaeologists into elaborate attempts to date the past by using a variety of subjective ordering techniques. It is therefore not surprising that, prior to the last ten years, most Mesoamerican lithic analyses had as their major objective the isolation of chronologically significant classes. These were discovered and defined at both the typological and the attribute (or modal) level of classification.

Pressure techniques were used to remove 83 blades from a preformed obsidian core weighing 820 grams, yielding 17.32 meters of acute cutting edge. The blades represented 91 percent of the original weight (2.1 centimeters of acute cutting edge per gram of original material), thus demonstrating the efficiency of the pressure-blade techniques for the production of acute cutting edges.