"Overall, Before the Volcano Erupted will open the eyes of many Mesoamerican archaeologists to the magnitude of what they may normally be missing, and will stand as a widely cited benchmark for years to come. It is a must-buy for Mayanists, most Mesoamerican archaeologists and students of volcanic archaeology, but archaeologists in general will find it a phenomenally interesting read."

—The Holocene

"The level of insight and reconstruction possible at Cerén is almost unparalleled in archaeology, certainly in the New World.... It's a remarkable story."

—Paul Healy, Professor of Anthropology, Trent University

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 and its accompanying CD-ROM and website (ceren.colorado.edu) present 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.