University of Colorado at Boulder anthropology Professor Payson Sheets will give a free public talk on Monday, Sept. 17, about the site of Ceren in El Salvador, buried by volcanic ash 1,400 years ago and considered the best preserved ancient village in Latin America.
The archaeology talk will be on campus at 7 p.m. in room 220 of the Education Building, located just north of the intersection of 15th Street and Broadway. Paid parking is available in the Euclid AutoPark located east of the University Memorial Center.
Sheets and his team have unearthed a wealth of artifacts from the Maya farming village buried under about 15 feet of ash, which produced a rare snapshot of the daily lives of ordinary people and new information about ancient Mayan agricultural practices. In June, Sheets and several graduate students discovered a buried manioc planting-field, the first evidence of cultivation of the calorie-rich tuber ever in the New World.
The finding may help explain how larger Mayan population centers sustained their populations. Discoveries at Ceren suggest a new interpretation of Mayan culture, which Sheets said was less dominated by the society's elite than many archaeologists believe.
The lecture is sponsored by the Boulder Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and the CU-Boulder departments of classics and anthropology. For more information, call 303-499-1750.