How it began
Joya de Ceren is a Maya farming village in present-day El Salvador that was buried under about ten feet of ash when the Loma Caldera volcano erupted, around 600 to 630 CE. Just outside the village, farmers had laid out manioc fields in raised planting ridges separated by walkways. Payson Sheets of the University of Colorado Boulder, who discovered Ceren in 1978, found parts of the fields in 2007 and exposed them with 18 large test pits in 2009.
Before it existed
Before this find, evidence for manioc among the ancient Maya was limited to pollen at sites in Belize, Mexico and Panama. That could not show whether manioc was a major crop or only a few garden plants, and the case for Classic period Maya manioc cultivation was considered weak. Attention had centered on corn, beans and squash.
How it works
Manioc was grown on ridges whose shapes and sizes varied from plot to plot. The field examined was at least a third the size of a football field. It had been harvested and replanted with stalk cuttings a few days before the eruption. The plants later decayed and left hollows in the ash, which the team filled with dental plaster to record their form. The manioc fields and nearby cornfields were aligned 30 degrees east of magnetic north, the same orientation as the village buildings.
What changed first
Sheets calculated that the fields would have produced roughly 10 metric tons of manioc a year for a village of 100 to 200 people, more than they could have eaten at once. The varied ridges suggested to him that individual farmers controlled their own family fields without direction from a higher authority. Manioc grows well in poor soils and resists drought, so it offered security when other crops failed.
What lasted
The University of Colorado describes the beds as the first and only evidence of an intensive manioc cultivation system at any New World archaeological site. Researchers believe that large manioc crops could have played a vital role in feeding dense populations across tropical Latin America, which changes the picture of ancient Maya farming as resting only on corn, beans and squash.
