Definitions and Considerations of Abundance

Abundance and surplus are at one end of an economic spectrum, with scarcity anchoring the other end. I view the difference between abundance and surplus as follows. Abundance is having so much of something that one does not worry about having more of it. A surplus of something is having more than one needs for individual or household consumption and is thus available for other uses, such as exchange. As Monica Smith (2012) observes, scarcity has received the predominance of attention by recent scholars. She defines abundance as “the recognition and/or creation of a large quantity of items” (2012:34). Her definition includes qualitative and quantitative elements. In chapter 1 of this volume she focuses on an “overwhelming quantity of artifacts” frequently collected by archaeologists on large projects. Archaeologists are often swamped by vast numbers of ceramic and lithic artifacts, especially when excavating large sedentary settlements, and they can readily view them as abundant. This is an etic concept. According to Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (1969:4), abundance is an ample or overflowing quantity, profusion, affluence, and a relative degree of plentifulness. This definition emphasizes quantitative over qualitative aspects. Kerry Hull (2005:12) provides the Ch’orti’ Maya word for abundance, b’oro, its definition in Spanish and English, and its use in a sentence. In this Ch’orti’ definition the quantitative predominates: “B’oro. Ap1. Multiplicar, abundar, aumentar, rendir, producir. Abound, multiply, increase, produce, yield. B’oro me’yra nar twa’ uk’uxi e jab’ xe’ numuy. Abundo mucho maiz para comer el año que paso. Last year corn was in abundance for eating.”

In this chapter I present both quantitative and qualitative aspects as we have documented and interpreted the material culture of the ancient Maya village of Cerén. The qualitative aspects can be differentiated into emic and etic components. What elements of their culture do we see as abundant, and what elements did they perceive as abundant? The former is not difficult to answer, but I argue that our perception of abundance may not be all that meaningful. Searching for what Cerénians perceived as abundant is more challenging, but at least in a few instances it is not impossible; and in the harvesting of great amounts of manioc, villagers apparently faced an irony or a dilemma when abundance created a scarcity, more specifically when material abundance created a labor scarcity (see below). Because the village was buried by a sudden explosive volcanic eruption, the record is of an instant of time; therefore, what we do not have is a longitudinal sample of changes and developments. It must be recognized that the agricultural production entombed and preserved that particular year may have been above or below average, and we have no way of measuring that annual variation. That annual variation would have directly affected emic and etic components of the abundance/surplus-scarcity agricultural spectrum. The study of abundance in any society is facilitated by a comparative framework that can be longitudinal or synchronic. Perceptions of abundance can be multi-scalar, from individuals through households to larger components of the society. Here we lack the longitudinal samples, but we can make some comparisons among households at Cerén and make limited comparisons with other households in the Zapotitan Valley. The latter comparisons are hampered by the lack of good preservation beyond the tephra blanket of the Loma Caldera eruption. Toward the end of this chapter I make brief comparisons of Cerén households to other valley households that were not covered by volcanic ash, in spite of the poor preservation of the latter.

Sample sizes should be kept in mind when dealing with data and interpretations in this chapter. The valley survey intensely covered only 15 percent of the entire area (Black 1978), and only twelve structures have been excavated at Cerén to date (Sheets 2002; figure 5.1). The most effective means of exploring abundance and the abundance-to-scarcity spectrum at Cerén would be to have other village sites with their households excavated that are contemporary and other village sites that preceded and postdated it, all with comparable preservation. Then detailed comparisons could be made of durables, perishables, kitchen garden plants, and seed and root crops in the agricultural fields. The problem, of course, is that those other well-preserved sites have yet to be discovered and investigated. Internally within the village we can perceive artifacts, architectural aspects, and crops that appear to be abundant, based on our expectations. An example is the high number of ceramic vessels per household that surprised us: about seventy (Beaudry-Corbett 2002:123). Over 20 percent of each household’s ceramics were polychrome decorated wares used for serving liquids and solid foods and obtained from markets at one of the elite centers in the valley.

Figure 5.1. Map of the Cerén site, El Salvador.

Most of the polychromes at Cerén were made in the Copan Valley and exported to elite settlements in the Zapotitan Valley near Cerén. Cerénians must have had sufficient surplus production of foodstuffs or basic goods, or collected firewood or thatching, or provided labor to obtain their polychrome vessels. The other 80 percent of their ceramics was locally made, within the village or very close, and they were used for cooking, water and hard-food storage, and storage of small valuable items. It is tempting at first glance to label this large number of ceramic vessels as abundant. But interpretive caution is needed here, as we need to know if that number is unusually large for other contemporary households in the Zapotitan Valley or elsewhere in Mesoamerica. It is important to point out that our surprise was grounded more in our ignorance than in either etic or emic knowledge of ceramic abundance. Did other households in the valley have similar large numbers per household? If so, the reason for our surprise is simply our lack of knowledge of widespread conditions at that time. Even within Cerén and its fine preservation, it is challenging to detect residents’ perception of abundance (an emic perception). However, when compared with the relatively complete floor-contact ceramic assemblages recovered from Xochicalco and Aguateca, described below, it is striking how many ceramic vessels commoner households owned at Cerén.

Excavations at three Epiclassic extended-family households at Xochicalco encountered an average of 71 whole ceramic vessels (with a wide range of 45 to 91) preserved by a catastrophic attack and rapid abandonment (Hirth 2006:27–47). The average number of vessels is strikingly close to that at Cerén, but the social contexts are considerably different. The Xochicalco residences were more like compounds, with 11–17 rooms in each, probably housing multiple families or households that were relatively affluent and thus fundamentally different from the nuclear family–based households in Cerén. Takeshi Inomata (2014:272) encountered complete and re-constructable ceramic vessels at Aguateca, also as a result of an attack and sudden abandonment. A total of 367 vessels were recovered from six structures, with a range of 16 to 95 per structure and a mean of 61. They date to the Late Classic, and most are royal or elite structures, with a few of a lower social class.

Two examples of possible emic judgments of abundance made by ancient Cerénians are briefly offered here. An example of a possible emic perception is in deciding that abundant or at least sufficient land was under cultivation so they could leave some arable land uncultivated (Sheets and Dixon 2011). During excavations south of the village, a few plots of land cultivated in previous years were left fallow for the agricultural season prior to the eruption. We could detect no evidence that soil erosion or nutrient leaching was the cause of the fallowing. Rather, it appeared the villagers decided that they had sufficient land under cultivation to produce sufficient food if precipitation was adequate. However, it is possible that the fallowing was for soil regeneration.

A more compelling case of emic abundance may be in the discovery of root crop productivity, harvesting, and processing. The tons of manioc tubers harvested from plots south of the village may have been perceived as emic abundance, especially when one notes how much was left behind in the raised beds. Manioc is developed in more detail below. It appears that agricultural productivity was sufficient to feed household members and provide a surplus in good years. That surplus was probably used for exchanges with other households in the Cerén village, in other villages nearby, and in the marketplaces in the valley where specialized products were available.

There are a number of cases where individual households had unusually large numbers of a certain commodity, and it would be tempting to identify those cases as abundances. However, close contextual examination has usually shown that the apparent abundance is the result of a special activity such as part-time craft specialization, to “overproduce” something relative to household needs to exchange within the community or valley (Sheets 2000). Each household had a functional specialization, a division of labor that produced tools or containers or vegetative products for local or distant exchange in an integrated regional economy. Cerén commoners maintained considerable agency in that regional economy in deciding what, where, and why they would engage in those exchanges. An unusual number of items in a household can also represent a service relationship by that household for a special facility or religious feasting ceremony. For example, the plethora of metates in Household 1 is revealing of a service relationship with the community ceremonial building.

Studies of personal satisfaction/happiness in contemporary Western societies have found that satisfaction/happiness is based not so much on absolute wealth (income and possessions) but rather on the comparisons people make with their peers, neighbors, relatives, and friends (Park 2010). Researchers found that people are happier if they perceive that they are wealthier than the group to which they compare themselves, in other words, their perception of ranking. Melanie Greenberg (2012) argues that relative wealth can be more important to happiness and satisfaction than can absolute wealth. The universality of wealth ranking and happiness is questionable when applied to traditional cultures. The cargo system functioning in many traditional highland Maya communities today can effectively redistribute wealth by having a family that has done better than others take on the expensive sponsorship of religious and social events. For example, Ruben Reina (1966:103, 122–29) documents how economically more prosperous individuals are chosen to serve one-year positions in the cofradias and how considerable their expenditures are. The system performs a leveling, homogenizing function. The family that experiences a decrease in wealth because of such a sponsorship can, however, experience an increase in prestige, status, respect, and appreciation through a conversion of tangibles to intangibles.

Sharing, Food, and Agriculture

The nature and implications of sharing as a form of exchange were innovatively explored by Michelle Hegmon (1991). Apart from the market exchanges that occurred in the Zapotitan Valley, many of her observations are applicable to activities within and among households in Cerén. She presents a spectrum of sharing ranging from none whatsoever in independent households through restricted sharing to pooling as complete sharing. She found that the most effective strategy to minimize risks of food shortages was restricted sharing, in which a household maintains storage in private and only shares what it deems as surplus. She uses Marshall Sahlins’s (1972) distinctions of generalized versus balanced reciprocity, in which generalized reciprocity is socially embedded and the returning of sharing may or may not be done or even expected. Balanced reciprocity involves obligations to return food or goods and is the form of reciprocity that predominates in sedentary agricultural societies. The return can be immediate or delayed but certainly not forgotten (e.g., Vogt 1969). The evidence unearthed at Cerén indicates that households participated in a well-developed system of balanced reciprocity in surplus and possibly abundant artisanal products, specialty foods, and vegetative items (figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2. Polychrome jar made in the Copan Valley, imported by elites, and available in a marketplace for commoners.

Varien, Potter, and Naranjo (this volume) describe the seasonal oscillation from scarcity to late-summer food abundance in the semiarid US Southwest and the resultant feasting that symbolized communal abundance. There, feasting involved common resources including maize and rabbits, and they were served in quotidian ceramic vessels. Although Cerén is in a tropical wet environment (mean precipitation 1,700 mm ± 300), it too was highly seasonal, with a six- month rainy season followed by a half year of very dry months (Sheets 2006:3). Maize was and still is planted in mid- to late May and matures in August. Then as now, it is not harvested all at once; rather, when the ear is mature, the stalk is bent over so the ear is upside-down and dries in the field. So maize was and still is harvested ear-by-ear only when needed, and that can be over many weeks or months.

Maize at Cerén is in contrast with the root crop manioc, which was cultivated in intensive plots 200 m south of the village (Sheets et al. 2012; figure 5.3). The monocropping was done in a highly structured area with field boundaries rigorously set by land lines (Sheets and Dixon 2011). Beyond the manioc beds, flat platforms were constructed, presumably for processing the harvest. Within the excavated fields at least four different farmers had cultivated manioc in raised and sloping beds for about a year. From that area over 10 metric tons of manioc tubers were harvested in a very short time, about a week or two just before the eruption. How much more than 10 tons is unknown, as we have discovered only two boundaries of the manioc fields. This certainly seems like a true emic and etic abundance. However, one needs to consider the labor intensity needed for pulling the tubers out of the ground and removing the cortex, as well as the great amount of labor needed for each form of processing. Manioc tubers spoil after a few days of being harvested, so one or most of the processing tasks need to be done promptly.

Figure 5.3. Manioc planting beds, with walkways between. Their irregular surfaces resulted from harvesting shortly before the eruption.

What could Cerénians have done with so much manioc? There are five potential uses: consumption, exchange, storage as flour, fermentation, and glue (Sheets et al. 2012). Tubers could have been carried to markets 5 km to the south or another 5 km to the north or to other nearby villages for exchange. Some must have been consumed, but a village of only 200 people would have had trouble consuming that much in just a few days. Another use is as glue (e.g., a binder for the white and red paint on Structures 10 and 12), but that would have used up only a tiny fraction of the harvest. The moderate degrees of wear of the paint indicate that the painting was done much earlier than the harvest, so no manioc juice glue was used from the harvest just before the eruption.

The only way manioc can be stored is if it is sliced into thin sections (disks), sun-dried for eight days, ground into flour, and kept dry. This process is very labor-intensive. Fermentation into a mild alcoholic beverage is also possible, as is done in many other areas of the world (Jennings et al. 2005), and it would have been appropriate during the ceremonies that were ongoing at Structure 10. Therefore, the abundance of manioc tubers harvested must have clashed with a scarcity of labor in doing the harvesting, hauling, decortication, and multiple modes of processing under a time crunch. About one out of six manioc tubers were missed in the harvesting and left in the ground, which I take as an emic abundance of manioc productivity. It would have taken only a slight bit more effort to dig into the planting bed to find the tubers that broke off the plant when the stalk was pulled up with most of the tubers attached. The soft, elevated planting beds would not even have required a digging stick to extract the remaining tubers. They merely could have dug in by hand, found them, and pulled them out. The fact that they did not spend the small additional effort to find and pull up the remaining tubers indicates that what came up with the pulling represented plentitude, in which a 1/6 wastage rate was acceptable given the harvest achieved and the available labor. I believe the reason for leaving so much manioc unharvested was the scarcity of labor for processing and consumption. The peak-load labor scarcity is reflected in the unharvested tubers. Might a similar situation have existed with the bison kills on the Great Plains (Nieves Zedeño, this volume)? Might the issue of waste noted by Klarich and colleagues (this volume) be pertinent?

Ironically, the abundance of manioc, with so much harvested that residents did not worry about the amount, may have created a scarcity in the labor needed for processing and use. The worry was directed more toward what to do with all of it. Abundance is not an unqualified “good,” as Twiss and Bogaard (this volume) also discuss. Nonetheless, as in the US Southwest (Varien, Potter and Naranjo, this volume), the harvest was celebrated at Cerén. The village-wide celebration was held at Structure 10, a building constructed just for that purpose, with sacred artifacts symbolizing the fertility of nature. The building and its contents are examined later in this chapter.

What Cerén Households Held in Common

Each household at Cerén evidently built and maintained its own buildings (Sheets 2002, 2006). Each had a domicile, a kitchen, and a storehouse. Each building was placed on a platform to facilitate drainage away from the interior, and, with the exception of the kitchen, the clay surface of the platform was fired for durability. The kitchens had replaceable floors of volcanic ash to absorb spills. Walls were wattle and daub, with vertical poles approximately every 20–25 cm reinforcing the mudded portions and extending upward to support the thatch roofs. The horizontal reinforcements inside the mudded portions were spaced 20 cm apart, with the net result of vernacular architecture that was among the most highly seismically resilient anywhere in the world. The thatch roofs of domiciles and storehouses extended for a meter or more beyond the walls, creating covered work spaces and areas for provisional storage. Based on artifacts, activity areas, and limited sleeping spaces in the domiciles, it appears that the households were occupied by nuclear families. Ethnographers understand that nuclear families can take advantage of new opportunities more readily than can more encumbered extended families (Dennis McGilvray, personal communication, 2014), and this seems particularly appropriate in the colonizing situation after ecological recovery from the Ilopango eruption when people came back into the area and founded the Cerén village. Given preservation of the thatch roofs and also the drip lines on the ground surrounding them, we can calculate that Household 1 had 89.25 m² under roofs (961 ft²). The household also had a ramada-style building (Structure 5) that increased the under-roof area to 94.25 m² (1,015 ft²). The estimated time two people would need to construct their three buildings is fifty days (Victor Manuel Murcia, personal communication, 1995). My etic appraisal evaluates such architecture for nuclear families as abundant in space, quality, and environmental appropriateness.

A striking commonality among all households at Cerén is incense burners (Sheets 2006). Not only did every household possess an incensario, but every household building had one. Every domicile, storehouse, and kitchen had one, and each tested positive for copal incense. They must have been used for family religious purposes, probably including contacting the spirits of deceased ancestors, accessing deities, exploring future situations, and likely petitioning for abundance in future agricultural cycles. Because no incensario was found in the public political building, the village feasting structure, the sauna, or the shaman’s building, it is clear that incensarios were specifically made and used for intra-household religious activities.

Found at each household was a relatively standard set of lithic, ceramic, and organic artifacts (Sheets 2002). In the category of organics each household had a few baskets, about a dozen plain gourds (largely for storing wood ash) and a few painted gourds, an antler tapiscador (cornhusker), various bone tools, lots of agave fiber twine and rope, net bags, many mats, and cotton fabric. Households stored considerable amounts of food in maize granaries and in ceramic vessels and particularly in the fields.

The chipped stone artifacts were all of obsidian and all from the nearby immense Ixtepeque source 75 km to the northwest. Each household had about a dozen prismatic blades, about half of which were in difficult-to-access storage high in the thatch roof and the other half in use. The ones in use were in convenient storage in easy-to-reach, predictable locations in the thatch roof. Such storage protects sharp cutlery and child-proofs homes. Each household had a scraper or two and a macroblade. All were obtained at a market; the only lithic fracturing activity was re-sharpening scrapers and perhaps macroblades.

An apparent abundance in the obsidian blades is how robust and therefore durable they were, in contrast to the blades in the Maya lowlands and beyond. By robust I mean they were relatively thick compared with their lowland cousins, and we developed a quantitative measure of this called the cutting-edge-to-mass ratio, or CE/M (Sheets and Muto 1972). Prismatic blades in western El Salvador during the Classic period, including Cerén, had an average of about 2.7 cm of cutting edge per gram of obsidian. In contrast, seven Classic period sites in Peten and Belize averaged 5.9 cm per gram (Sheets 1978), more than twice the length of cutting edge per gram. The highest measured length in that small study was 8.3 cm/g at Tres Zapotes, more than three times the cutting edge per gram of obsidian than at Cerén. One could try to argue that at Tres Zapotes consumers experienced an abundance of cutting edge relative to the amount/weight of obsidian they had, but to achieve it they produced very thin and thus very fragile blades. In the Zapotitan Valley, an abundance of obsidian allowed manufacturers to create durable thick blades. The primary factor here, of course, is distance from the source. Cerén is only 75 km from the Ixtepeque source, while the lowland sites are hundreds of kilometers from the sources. Lowland manufacturers “stretched” the obsidian into thinner blades to economize on a scarcer material. I doubt that at any of the localities, whether close or at a great distance from the source, there was a general emic perception of abundance of either material or cutting edge. Rather, at each household I think both would have oscillated in numbers with blades that were familiar in thickness to the residents: as blades were used and discarded, the people would have perceived an impending scarcity and taken action to obtain more.

In the category of groundstone, each household had a mano-metate set and a few donut stones used for a variety of purposes. Each household also had a single jade ax, surely the most expensive item a household obtained from a market. Every household also had a few lajas (flat-fractured andesite slabs), small grinding stones, and a few smoothing stones—probably for architectural construction and renovation. Households also had pigments, primarily hematite and limonite but also some cinnabar (mercuric sulfide), and they shared many agricultural similarities, beginning with kitchen gardens and the variety of food and medicinal species (Sheets and Woodward 2002). Surrounding each household was a high-performance milpa (Wilken 1971) that had been planted in maize at the beginning of the rainy season and matured in August, at which moment the Loma Caldera tephra buried it. The maize plants grew on carefully constructed ridges that followed the architectural orientation of the village (at 30° east of north) or its perpendicular. The dry-weight productivity of maize in these near-household fields was considerable indeed, probably because of greater care in cultivation and fertilization by kitchen scraps and human excreta and the lowered chance of passers-by removing ears in an unauthorized manner. Had the Loma Caldera eruption occurred a few weeks later, we presumably would have found evidence of beans and squash having been planted. The structures and surrounding agricultural fields give the impression of a highly ordered landscape and likely household pride in creating and maintaining it.

Beyond the architectural area of the village is what we are calling the intermediate zone, where a farmer’s plot does not visually connect with household buildings and neat fields (Sheets and Dixon 2011). The variation in field maintenance was striking, ranging from ridging almost as well done as the near-household ones to only mounding around each maize plant cluster to no micro-topographic management whatsoever. We interpret the greater range of variation in this outside-village area as resulting from less social pressure to conform to the ideal, so farmers had greater latitude in choices. The farmer who did no micro-topographic field management did save time but suffered slightly in decreased maize productivity per unit area. We nicknamed him “el perezoso” (the lazy one). Farmers strategically made use of the potential for increased productivity in this zone at the cost of investing greater labor. Here, as with so many human endeavors, there is a tradeoff relationship between a desired abundance of productivity and a scarcity of labor. We detected no differences in weeding among these farmers.

How Cerén Households Differed: Particular “Abundances” and Their Interpretations

Each household excavated at Cerén to date has provided evidence of producing something in excess of its own consumptive needs (details in Sheets 2000). While excavating and noting those unusual numbers of items in each household, our first reaction was that they represented abundance. However, we quickly realized otherwise, for instance, that the large numbers of manos and metates and the tools to manufacture them were there for good reasons in Household 1 and were not necessarily etic or emic abundance. Rather, they represented a balanced reciprocity in the sense of Sahlins (1972) and Hegmon (1991). One mano-metate set was manufactured and in use as the primary grinding stone on the floor of the kitchen, and others were manufactured to exchange with other households when both supplier and receiver reached an agreement. Household 1 maintained the tools for manufacture, primarily hammerstones, and the knowledge about how and where to obtain the andesite with the proper vesicularity and rough shape. That household also manufactured, used, and exchanged donut stones. In addition, most of the spindle whorls recovered at the site to date were found in this household, indicating a large amount of cotton fiber production. Because of the weight of metates, they were likely only exchanged within the community, but donut stones and cotton thread or fabric were likely exchanged in a market for the obsidian tools, jade ax, pigments, and polychrome vessels the household desired and owned.

Tracy Sweely (1999) ingeniously used the location and positioning of the metates in Household 1 to infer subtle power relationships among the women presumably using them. The metate on the floor in the kitchen (Beaudry-Corbett, Simmons, and Tucker 2002) clearly was in quotidian use, as evidenced by the deep use-wear it sustained and its location adjacent to the hearth and to the pot that soaked maize overnight. The other four metates sustained the same amount of only slight use-wear, and three of the four were mounted on horquetas (thick forked sticks) that supported them so grinding could be done by a standing person. The Loma Caldera tephra packed around the metates and supported them in their original positions, even though the sticks decomposed and left hollow spaces after the eruption. Because a person would have stood behind the more elevated end of the metate while grinding, pushing the maize dough off the lower end, Sweely determined who could have seen whom and thus inferred a power hierarchy. She argued that the woman who could see all the others was the most powerful of the group.

So, why did Household 1 have so many metates? Why does it seem like there was such an abundance of metates at Household 1 when a household only needs one? I believe the answer lies in the service relationship between this household and Structure 10 (Brown and Gerstle 2002), the community ritual-ceremonial building adjacent to it. The household evidently looked after the building in terms of maintenance and loaned the building many of its ceramic vessels and cornhuskers for feasting (Sheets 2006). The horqueta-mounted metates must have been used just to grind maize for the harvest festival, and therefore what appeared to be an abundance of metates may not have been at all. One of the metates was upside-down, in between the horquetas, which I interpret as women making the decision that sufficient maize could be ground with the three mounted ones, so the fourth was left in its storage position. In this case what appeared to be abundance was apparently judged by the women as sufficient for that occasion. In not mounting the last metate, I think they decided to avoid an overabundance of ground maize dough. An apparent abundance, when the social context is understood, might well not be abundance at all but might be interpreted as a socially risky endeavor (see Twiss and Bogaard, this volume).

Structure 7, the storehouse of Cerén’s Household 2 (McKee 2002), contained an unusual number of pottery ollas for water and an unusual amount of firewood. The proximity of the storehouse to the sauna, only 6 m to the south, suggests a service relationship rather than an abundance of either of these items. It appears that household members provided firewood for the sauna’s firebox and water to pour over the firebox to make steam as well as for drinking and rinsing off after exiting. Household 4’s part-time specialization was vegetative commodities (Gerstle and Sheets 2002; Sheets 2006). They grew seventy agave (maguey) plants to supply all their household needs for fiber for twine and rope and much, if not all, of the community’s needs as well. They also grew and processed cacao and grew the cane poles used in wattle-and-daub vertical pole reinforcements, which also functioned to support the roof. A line of mature chili plants ran to the west of the building, supplying many households. I suspect these chili plants supplied all the chilies needed for the entire village.

The Village Feasting Ceremonial Center

By focusing on the broader issue of activities at Structure 10, the village feasting facility that was celebrating the harvest, I suggest we can perceive an important domain: the community effort to give thanks for the actual abundance of the harvest and to lay the supernatural groundwork for abundance to characterize the next agrarian cycle. Irene Winter (2007) explored the visual aspects of highly stratified ancient Mesopotamian states that desired divine beneficence in food production, clearly on the “writ-large” scale, and at Cerén we can see the same desire and related activity “writ-small” in this village of Maya commoners. The structure consists of two rooms on a formal platform making up the superstructure, an entrance corridor, and a large anteroom enclosure (Brown and Sheets 2001; Sheets 2002, 2006). The building functioned to store ceremonial paraphernalia and to process and serve festival food. Community ceremonies were produced in and around the building, with the latter evidenced by the extremely hard-packed surfaces to the building’s east and especially its north (figure 5.4). Dances and theatrical/musical performances likely took place beyond those sides of the building. A person authorized to enter the building did so by opening a pole door and passing through a narrow corridor that ran along the north side of the building. Two hearths and a metate mounted on horquetas, with an open bowl below the lower end to catch the masa, were located in that corridor.

Figure 5.4. Artist’s rendition of Structure 10, built for ceremonies celebrating the harvest.

Maize was de-husked with three deer antlers and deer bone tools, and discarded corncobs were mute testimony to shelling the corn. No antler de-huskers were found in Household 1, so I suspect that these three were loaned from there as part of the service relationship. Passing through the corridor one entered the anteroom, loaded with food in vessels accompanied by serving vessels. The anteroom was an active area of food preparation and serving, in contrast to the upper two rooms. A total of thirty-six vessels were recovered, and a similar number probably remain under the unexcavated fallen walls at the building’s southeast corner. Five of the ceramics were polychrome food-serving vessels. It is possible that people brought their own gourd vessels to receive food and drink. Painted gourds, likely made in Household 2, were also used for food serving. Judging from the amount of food still in the twenty jars, the harvest ritual was almost half completed when the volcanic eruption struck.

Ritual and unique artifacts were stored in the front (east) room of the structure. I believe the most sacred item was a deer skull headdress stored on the high shelf that ran the full length of the middle of the building. The skull was painted red, with some white and blue, and still has the twine used to secure it to the wearer’s head during performances. Next to the deer skull headdress was an obsidian blade that tested positive for human hemoglobin (Sheets 2006:110). It must have been used for bloodletting in rituals. A large jar full of achiote seeds was on the floor below the skull. Achiote is a powerful (in both physical and supernatural senses) red pigment that symbolizes human blood and the ch’ulel (soul-spirit) in it, and it was used to decorate bodies and artifacts during rituals in ancient and contemporary times (McGee 1990). Deer scapulae and numerous other items made from deer bones (beads and unusually shaped artifacts) were apparently part of the ritual paraphernalia used in ceremonies. This front room of the main building, on the platform, had walls and lower pilasters painted white, with red paint on the upper part of the pilasters. The red was hematite, and the white was extra–fine-grained Ilopango volcanic ash attached with a binder, likely manioc juice. The painting emphasizes the importance of the structure’s purpose: to obtain divine beneficence for the next agrarian cycle.

The predominance of deer bone and antler paraphernalia in this structure, especially the painted deer skull headdress, indicates a focus on the fertility of nature (Schlesinger 2001:182). The view was presumably bi-directional, giving thanks for the harvest immediately past and simultaneously asking for supernatural assistance for the upcoming growing season and harvest. Clearly, large amounts of food were prepared in the corridor, stored in the anteroom, and dispensed to participants over the half-height wall. Drinks were likely served, although we have no direct evidence of them. The most likely drinks are water and chicha made from maize or manioc. No beverage serving vessels were found, but almost half of the anteroom has yet to be excavated, and cylinder vessels could be in that area. Or people could well have brought gourds into which beverages were poured.

The harvest ceremonies can be interpreted as the community desiring abundance in the future harvest by giving thanks for the present harvest and invoking the supernatural domain to achieve it. Of course, Cerénians were well aware of the weather/climatic cycles that resulted in variable harvests, and they requested divine intervention to assist in bountifulness. In this domain I am confident that we can see desired emic abundance.

Isolated Households in the Zapotitan Valley

The attempt in this chapter to make comparisons with other valley households was stimulated by Smith’s (2012:27) observation that “the earliest urban centers were attractive places of settlement because they represented a greater variety of jobs and objects compared to the rural countryside.” Of course, the scale in the Zapotitan Valley is dramatically smaller than the cities of South Asia and the Near East, but at a much smaller scale we can make at least a partial comparison of households in the Cerén village with isolated households in the surrounding valley and discern some significant differences.

The 1978 archaeological survey of the Zapotitan Valley encountered eighteen “hamlets” and one isolated residence within the 82 km² covered, representing 15 percent of the entire valley (Black 1978:73–74). Collections from surface surveys represent different sampling strategies than do excavated samples, thus limiting the robustness of comparisons. Nevertheless, some generalizations may be possible. About half of the “hamlets” were so small that they were probably separate individual households. Although none of them were buried catastrophically by tephra in a way that would have provided a comparable level of preservation with Cerén, sufficient artifacts were present to date them and get some idea of how they functioned. All of them showed evidence of making their own metates and manos. The evidence was the finding of numerous hammerstones and fragments of manos and metates that were broken in manufacture. An observer could comment that isolated families had an abundance of tools to make ground-stone implements and probably an abundance of the implements themselves compared to the average Cerén household. However, that would be a misperception, as it appears that isolated households had to produce their own heavy grinding stones. Although this is not definitive, these data might be a proxy for isolated households having to make a higher proportion of the other goods, such as utilitarian ceramics, they used in their houses than did households in villages. At Cerén, a household would have overproduced something and exchanged for other commodities with another household only minutes away. Isolated households needed to be more self-sufficient and therefore to maintain the knowledge and implements needed to make a wider range of consumer goods. Isolated households went to marketplaces and engaged in exchanges much like Cerén households. But they did not have the advantage of other nearby households engaging in part-time productive specializations and therefore had to produce a wider range of goods for themselves than did the interrelated Cerén households.

The Cerén village households were considerably more economically integrated than the isolated households. The Cerén households give the appearance of a compressed rural settlement, with each household’s agricultural fields surrounding its buildings and abutting on its neighbors’ fields. Crowding relative to the isolated families may have been perceived, but the isolated households may have enjoyed a relative abundance of arable land. The part-time craft specializations of each village household confer an artisanal efficiency and complementarity because each household did not need to maintain the knowledge, experience, and manufacturing tools required to make all the needed commodities. And each household was only a five-minute walk from the others to make the exchanges. The negotiations involved in the exchanges surely developed a rich social network in the village, occasionally resulting in conflict but often working to the economic and social advantage of the components of the community.

But there was a tradeoff as the households clustered into a village, and that unfortunately was the risk of theft (Sheets 2006:47). The storehouse of Household 1 was undergoing renovation just prior to the eruption by removing the mudded portions of the walls and replacing the vertical poles and horizontal reinforcements. They had completed renovation of only the east wall and doorway and had only replaced the vertical poles on the other three sides. Thus, there were spaces between the poles averaging about 20 cm. All the valuable items that were smaller than 20 cm had been moved into temporary storage in the domicile, an apparent perception of the risk of theft. Items larger than the gaps between the poles were still in the storehouse. The other households’ storehouses contained small valuable items, which seems to have been the cultural pattern when that building was complete.

Conclusion

From this small sample of Zapotitan Valley households during the Classic period, we can perceive a correlation between settlement size and the division of labor. The isolated households produced a wider range of commodities because the greater distance to other households inhibited regular exchanges, in contrast to the households in villages. At least with groundstone tools, each isolated household manufactured its own. In the Cerén village each household exchanged surplus food, part-time artisanal goods, or vegetative specialties. Those exchanges occurred within the village, with other nearby villages, and in marketplaces. Household 1 manufactured its own metates and manos and exchanged its surplus production for the commodities available from other households. Household 2 did polychrome decoration of gourds, and Household 4 produced prodigious amounts of agave fiber, chili, and cacao.

Two of the households undertook service relationships. Household 2 maintained the sauna by stocking sufficient firewood for its firebox and water for creating steam, for rinsing, and for drinking. Household 1 supported the community feasting and rituals celebrating the harvest at nearby Structure 10. In a sense, one could argue that each household had sufficient or abundant time to put into those activities.

Identifying with confidence what ancient people perceived as abundant versus surplus is challenging for archaeologists. Perhaps the easiest domain in which to perceive abundance is the supernatural, where people were requesting divine intervention to support the fertility of nature. The harvest ceremony and feasting that was in process at Structure 10 is the example at Cerén. It is not surprising that the ancient Maya developed rituals focused on maize rather than manioc, as maize is highly sensitive to temperature and moisture. Manioc is drought-adapted and very durable, and it produces prodigious amounts of food regularly; therefore, it does not need divine intervention. The impressive tonnage of production, probably perceived as abundance at the time, ironically resulted in a scarcity of labor required for harvesting, decortication, and processing.

Acknowledgments. The predominance of support for research at Cerén has come from the archaeology program at NSF, for which I am immensely grateful. The advice and counsel of John Yellen is particularly appreciated. Dennis McGilvray provided ethnographic insights. My colleagues at the University of Colorado in Boulder provided astute critiques of weak or confusing sections, and I express my appreciation here. They are Art Joyce, Cathy Cameron, Steve Lekson, John Hoffecker, Gerardo Gutierrez, and Scott Ortman. My good Salvadoran friend Victor Manuel Murcia provided insights into traditional life in his country and carefully calculated estimates of the time needed to construct the wattle-and-daub structures. I acknowledge Monica Smith for inviting me to participate in her SAA symposium and to provide this chapter in her book. Her copyediting certainly improved the text. My colleagues Ken Hirth and Takeshi Inomata assisted my comparisons of ceramics per household or compound.