A Maya farming village that got buried alive by ash and thereby survived. Around AD 600 the Loma Caldera vent went up and dropped ten metres of pyroclastic debris on the place. The ash was cool and it came fast, which is the combination that preserves things, and the evidence says it happened in the early evening and the roughly two hundred residents got out. What stayed is the extraordinary part: standing buildings, food still in storage, crops still in the ground, household kit sitting where it was put down. Plaster casting brought a lot of it back the way Pompeii was recovered. A manioc field here was the first ever identified at a New World site. Most Maya archaeology is kings and temples; this is what ordinary people actually ate and owned. UNESCO listed it in 1993. Zapotitán Valley, about 36 km northwest of San Salvador.
La Libertad, El Salvador
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