Tag: Salvador

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Pre-Columbian ‘Puppets’ indicate ritual connections across Central America

  • Five expressive ceramic figurines have been discovered atop a large pyramidal structure at Preclassic San Isidro, El Salvador. 

  • Their movable heads and positioning suggest they were a kind of puppet, used in ritual scenes or ‘tableaus’.

  • Similarities with examples from other Central American countries imply interaction and shared ritual traditions across this vast region.

  • This contradicts the commonly-held belief that El Salvador was culturally isolated from the rest of Central America.

     

    Five figurines from the San Isidro deposit. Scale in centimetres (credit: J. Przedwojewska-Szymańska/PASI)

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Poles on the fringes of Mesoamerica

Archaeologists from the University of Warsaw have commenced archaeological excavations at a pre-Hispanic site in El Salvador. Apart from a few mentions in the literature and sporadic, mostly informal, visits by local and foreign archaeologists, the site of San Isidro remained hitherto uninvestigated.

Wykopaliska na El Cerrito – największa struktura San Isidro © J. Szymański / PASI, zdjęcie na licencji CC BY 4.0
Excavations at El Cerrito – the largest structure at San Isidro
© J. Szymański / PASI, zdjęcie na licencji CC BY 4.0

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