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 presents 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.

Building an Archaeology of Maya Urbanism tears down entrenched misconceptions of Maya cities to build a new archaeology of Maya urbanism by highlighting the residential dynamics that underwrote one of the most famous and debated civilizations of the ancient Americas. Exploring the diverse yet interrelated agents and processes that modified Maya urban landscapes over time, this volume highlights the adaptive flexibility of urbanization in the tropical Maya lowlands.
 
Integrating recent lidar survey data with more traditional excavation and artifact-based archaeological practices, chapters in this volume offer broadened perspectives on the patterns of Maya urban design and planning by viewing bottom-up and self-organizing processes as integral to the form, development, and dissolution of Classic lowland cities alongside potentially centralized civic designs. Full of innovative examples of how to build an archaeology of urbanism that can be applied not just to the lowland Maya and across the region, Building an Archaeology of Maya Urbanism simultaneously improves interpretations of lowland Maya culture history and contributes to empirical and comparative discussions of tropical, non-Western cities worldwide.
 
 
Contributors: Divina Perla Barrera, Arianna Campiani, Cyril Castanet, Adrian S. Z. Chase, Lydie Dussol, Sara Dzul Góngora, Keith Eppich, Thomas Garrison, María Rocio González de la Mata, Timothy Hare, Julien Hiquet, Takeshi Inomata, Eva Lemonnier, José Francisco Osorio León, Marilyn Masson, Elsa Damaris Menéndez, Timothy Murtha, Philippe Nondédéo, Keith M. Prufer, Louise Purdue, Francisco Pérez Ruíz, Julien Sion, Travis Stanton, Rodrigo Liendo Stuardo, Karl A. Taube, Marc Testé, Amy E. Thompson, Daniela Triadan

Maya architecture is often described as "massive" and "monumental," but experiments at Copan, Honduras, convinced Elliot Abrams that 300 people could have built one of the large palaces there in only 100 days.

In this groundbreaking work, Abrams explicates his theory of architectural energetics, which involves translating structures into volumes of raw and manufactured materials that are then multiplied by the time required for their production and assembly to determine the labor costs of past construction efforts. Applying this method to residential structures of the Late Classic period (A.D. 700-900) at Copan leads Abrams to posit a six-tiered hierarchic social structure of political decision making, ranging from a stratified elite to low-ranking commoners. By comparing the labor costs of construction and other economic activities, he also prompts a reconsideration of the effects of royal construction demands on commoners.

How the Maya Built Their World will interest a wide audience in New and Old World anthropology, archaeology, architecture, and engineering.