Volcano Locked Mayan Settlement in a Time Capsule : Archeology: For excited investigators, the 1,400-year-old civilization is a Pompeii in El Salvador.

On a June evening 1,400 years ago, a volcano suddenly erupted in what is now El Salvador and sealed an entire prehistoric settlement in a time capsule, complete with the dirty dishes of a civilization that flourished 600 years before Columbus arrived in the New World.

Buried beneath 15 feet of volcanic ash and extensively excavated for the first time last summer, the houses of the village of El Ceren are preserved in such exceptional condition that archeologists say the dwellings and their contents are as nearly intact as Pompeii, the Greco-Roman city buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79.

“No other site in the New World has domestic architecture so well preserved,” said Paul Amaroli, an archeologist at Vanderbilt University who has visited El Ceren. “It’s hard to wear out superlatives on this site.”

The excitement over El Ceren stems from the fact that although monumental architecture such as Mayan temples and Aztec tombs are abundant in the area, well-preserved households of the peasants and commoners who built the ceremonial cities and carried out commerce and farming are rare.

Even more precious are dwellings that have been preserved with the clutter of everyday life--the garden tools, the pots and jars, even the dead ducks in the courtyard--found in the same locations as they were that day 1,400 years ago when the volcano exploded.

“They lived better than we had pictured them,” said Payson Sheets, an archeologist from the University of Colorado in Boulder who is leading the excavation of El Ceren.

“We realize now that their domestic adobe architecture was much more sophisticated than we thought. The structures sit on big, fired platforms. They’d be dry even during the rainy season. The roofs were substantial. These were not people living crowded and huddled in a mud hut. Even their poorest houses were better than much of the rural houses in El Salvador today. They really seemed to be fairly well off.”

In El Ceren, ceramic pots were found tucked into adobe niches where they were placed by the occupants. A digging stick leans against a doorway. A wooden pestle rests in a stone mortar. Enigmatic graffiti are still visible in one room.

Two metates, the flat stones used for grinding flour, were discovered still resting on the forked wooden posts that supported them in use. Sharp obsidian knives, some with food residue still clinging to the blades, are wedged into the thatched roof, placed as if to be safely out of reach of children.

And what may turn out to be the only book, or codex, as archeologists call them, to survive was found in a small cubbyhole beside three painted pots and an oyster shell.

“Other codices survive from Mesoamerica, but they were all squirreled away someplace, hidden, and then ended up in collections. None of the codices are attached to a context. We don’t know where they’re from or who used them. . . . Here we have a book from an agricultural setting,” said Harriet Beaubien, an expert in the conservation of antiquities at the Smithsonian Institution who is trying to preserve the painted codex found in a block of ash at El Ceren.

The Mayan settlement of El Ceren was inadvertently uncovered by a bulldozer helping to construct grain storage silos in 1976.

Sheets was in El Salvador, working at another site, and heard about the discovery of “recent houses” found under 15 feet of volcanic ash. Sheets said he expected the houses to be a hundred years old at the most.

“I brought a trowel and went looking for Coke bottles, pieces of tin, plastic wrappers--something that would date the structures,” Sheets said. “Instead, I found a prehistoric pot. Well, I thought, these people must have had an interest in prehistory. I still didn’t know what I was dealing with. Then I started finding more pots and I took some thatch samples for radiocarbon dating.”

Radiocarbon analysis of the thatch dated the structure about AD 600. Sheets was immediately intrigued, but even though he received funding from the National Science Foundation to begin excavating the site, he said he did not think it was safe to bring colleagues and students to El Salvador, which was then in the midst of a civil war. Sheets did not return to work in El Salvador until last summer, when the first extensive excavations were begun.

El Ceren was buried when a vein of basaltic magma from the nearby Laguna Caldera Volcano came into contact with water from Rio Sucio. The combination of super-hot magma and water created steam explosions that blasted clouds of hot steam and ash toward El Ceren, a village of still unknown size. The rain of hot ash sealed the village within a volcanic cast.

To date, three extended households have been excavated, along with outbuildings and storerooms. Nearby were furrowed fields with rows of short, young corn stalks along each little ridge, leading Sheets to guess that the volcano erupted in June. The fact that objects like digging sticks and cooking pots were put away makes Sheets suspect that the eruption occurred at night.

Dan Miller, a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory who has studied the site, said he thinks there were several eruptions and ground shaking caused by volcanic earthquakes.

“Once the eruptions began, it would be hard to get away. With the fall of ash, it would be pitch black. The hot surges would be very lethal. The temperatures of the clouds would at least be boiling,” Miller said.

“There’d be hot, moist ash with larger chunks of rock sailing along or falling out of the sky. People would be scalded, their lungs would burn and they’d probably die of asphyxiation.”

Strangely, and with some disappointment, Sheets said that no human remains have been found in El Ceren. Residents who watched the bulldozer find the first household report seeing human bones and described shapes that might have been body casts.

They have disappeared. Sheets expects further digging to reveal remains in one of the several structures still not fully excavated, or in a household yet to be found.