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About 1,500 years ago, Mayan builders made a massive pyramid out of rock that had been ejected by a volcano in an eruption so powerful it chilled the planet, scientists recently found.
Around 539 AD, in what is now San Andrés, El Salvador, the Ilopango Caldera erupted in what was the largest volcanic event in Central America in the past 10,000 years. Known as the Tierra Blanca Joven (TBJ) eruption, the volcano produced lava flows that spanned tens of kilometers, and it spat so much ash into the atmosphere over Central America that the climate in the northern hemisphere has cooled, reported researchers.
Due to the destructive power of the volcano, scientists believed that many Maya the settlements were abandoned, perhaps 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 were returning to the region much earlier, building the monument just decades after the eruption.
Related: In photos: the hidden Mayan civilization
A new analysis of the pyramid, located about 40 kilometers from the volcano in the Zapotitán Valley, also revealed that Mayan builders were mixing blocks of hewn stone and earth with blocks hewn from tephra, a 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.
Researchers have debated the date of TBJ’s eruption for decades, with some claiming the volcano erupted much earlier, between AD 270 and AD 400, Ichikawa wrote in the new study, published Sept. 21 in the newspaper. antiquity. However, recent radiocarbon dating (comparison of radioactivity reports carbon isotopes) in tree trunks in El Salvador had suggested that the year 539 was a more accurate estimate, Ichikawa said.
The Campana pyramid rests on a platform measuring almost 6 meters high, 80 meters long and 55 meters wide, and the pyramid itself is approximately 13 meters high. The platform also includes four terraces and a wide central staircase. It was the first public building erected on the San Andrés Valley site after the TBJ eruption, which would have buried much of the valley under nearly 0.5m of ash, according to the study.
Ichikawa calculated the age of the structure using carbon samples taken from different pyramid building materials, dating them between AD 545 and 570 five years after the TBJ eruption, Ichikawa said.
The amount of tephra in the pyramid was also surprising, he told Live Science in an email. About ten years ago, archaeologist and UCB professor Payson Sheets detected tephra in a Mayan “sacbe” or “white road” – an elevated artery – at the Joya de Cerén site. Also located in El Salvador, the pre-Hispanic farming community of Cerén was buried in a volcanic eruption around 600 AD and is known as “Pompeii of the Americas, ”Ichikawa explained.
However, Campana is the first known Mayan monument to include tephra as a building material. In the Cerén sacbe, the white ash tephra “may have been perceived to have powerful religious or cosmological significance” due to its volcanic origin, and the tephra may have been of similar importance in the Campana pyramid, according to the study.
Climatic and environmental disasters, such as volcanic eruptions, are often linked to the collapse or decline of ancient civilizations; in Ptolemaic Egypt (305 BC to 30 BC), a volcano may have condemned an ancient dynasty, and when an Alaskan volcano erupted in 43 BC, it may have sounded the death knell for the Roman Republic, Previously reported live science. But Campana’s structure tells a different story, demonstrating that ancient peoples were able to rebuild themselves from the ashes of destruction and that they were more resilient, flexible and innovative than previously thought, Ichikawa said.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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