Giant pyramid built by the Maya was made from rock spewed by a volcano

By Mindy Weisberger about 8 hours ago

The enormous structure may have been intended to honor the eruption.



The Campana structure, with the San Salvador volcanic complex in the background. (Image credit: Copyright Antiquity Publications Ltd/ Photo by A. Ichikawa)

About 1,500 years ago, Maya builders crafted a massive pyramid out of rock that had been ejected by a volcano, in an eruption that was so powerful it chilled the planet, scientists recently discovered.

Around A.D. 539, in what is now San Andrés, El Salvador, the Ilopango caldera erupted in what was the biggest volcanic event in Central America in the last 10,000 years. Known as the Tierra Blanca Joven (TBJ) eruption, the volcano produced lava flows that extended for dozens of miles, and it belched so much ash into the atmosphere over Central America that the climate cooled across the Northern Hemisphere, researchers previously reported.

Because of the volcano's destructive power, scientists thought that many of the region's Mayan settlements were abandoned, possibly for centuries. But in a recent analysis of a Mayan pyramid known as the Campana structure, Akira Ichikawa, a Mesoamerican archaeologist and postdoctoral associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB), found that people returned to the region much sooner, building the monument just decades after the eruption.

New analysis of the pyramid, located about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from the volcano in the Zapotitán Valley, also revealed that Maya builders mixed cut stone blocks and earth with blocks carved from tephra — rock ejected by a volcano. This is the first evidence that volcanic ejecta was used in the construction of a Mayan pyramid, and it could reflect the spiritual significance of volcanoes in Mayan culture, Ichikawa said.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/mayan-pyramid-from-volcano?utm_source=notification

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More:
https://www.heritagedaily.com/2021/09/maya-pyramid-built-in-response-to-eruption-of-lago-ilopango-volcanic-caldera/141440

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Human responses to the Ilopango Tierra Blanca Joven eruption: excavations at San Andrés, El Salvador
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2021

Akira Ichikawa



Abstract

Human responses to catastrophic natural events form an important research theme in archaeology. Using excavation and radiocarbon data, this article investigates the socio-cultural impact of the mid-first-millennium AD Tierra Blanca Joven eruption at San Andrés, El Salvador. The data, along with an architectural energetic analysis of the Campana structure at San Andrés, indicate that survivors and/or re-settlers made considerable efforts to construct monumental public buildings immediately following the eruption, using large quantities of volcanic tephra as construction material. Such re-building played important religious, social and political roles in human responses to the eruption. The study contributes to discussions about human creativity, adaptation and resilience in the face of abrupt environmental change.

More:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/human-responses-to-the-ilopango-tierra-blanca-joven-eruption-excavations-at-san-andres-el-salvador/C3C5F323AF8489C3729B630FBC063B10#article