Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 8 · column 5 of 8 · from the scan, no model involved
By BARBARA MOFFETT
National Grographirii Writer
WASHINGTON—About 1,500 years ago, in late May or early June, a Central American volcano erupted so suddenly that the occupants of at least one house in the area didn’t have a chance to get away.
The people were burned to death or asphyxiated. Their wattle and daub house and newly sprouting cornfield were covered with volcanic ash, “freezing" them like a New World Pompeii.
So in the mid-1970s, when a bulldozer on a government project in what is now El Salvador inadvertently unearthed the remains of the house, it was gound in such good condition that a historian called to the site estimated its age at 100 years. The bulldozer continued to dig, destroying part of the house as well as the skeletal remains of its occupants.
Only later, when a University of Colorado archeologist went to have a look, did anyone realize that the house unearthed 17 feet down in that Salvadoran field was actually a dwelling of the ancient Maya, a people who flourished from A.D. 250 to 900 until their society suddenly collapsed for reasons still not understood.
"At first I was struck by how well-preserved the house was," recalled Dr. Payson Sheets. 36, the University of Colorado archeologist, whose specialty is Central America. “I thought it might be recent until I found some Maya polychrome pottery—a very distinctive style.
"Clearly it was 1,500 years old. So at that point I realized we really had something.” The site now is considered the best preserved farmhouse ever found in Central America.
Sheets and a crew from the university quickly started some digging of their own in 1978, a project still under way. It has turned up five rooms of the house, along with its palm-thatched roof, completely intact. The house. Sheets says, appears to have been built much like those sheltering present-day Salvadorans living only 200 feet from the site.
The crew also found the family farm plot—neat rows qf new corn plants preserved so well in the fine volcanic ash that even their cellular structure endured. The project is supported by the National Geographic Society and the National Science Foundation.
89.4%