El Salvador burial under 2,800-year ash held turtle-shaped vessel
Archaeologists in El Salvador discovered a 2,800-year-old burial site containing a human skeleton clutching a turtle-shaped vessel. The find, located under volcanic ash, provides new insights into pre-Maya burial practices and potential human sacrifice.
Why it matters
This discovery offers valuable archaeological evidence regarding the social and ritualistic complexities of Middle Preclassic Mesoamerican civilizations.
There are no limits to a human's materialistic wants and emotional feelings. Attachment is the quickest development to happen and the slowest to recede. This is possibly why archaeologists in El Salvador found a 2,800-year-old burial of a person clutching a sea turtle vessel.The Mesoamerican burial found a face-down human skeleton that may be from a pre-Maya civilisation that practised human sacrifice. According to a translated statement from El Salvador's Ministry of Culture, the burial was found on July 2 in Antiguo Cuscatlán, a suburb of San Salvador, during excavation work directed by Carlos Flores Manzano, an archaeologist and doctoral student at Yale University.Although the skeleton has not been radiocarbon-dated yet, it was discovered underneath a layer of volcanic ash from an eruption of the Plan de la Laguna volcanic crater thought to date between 850 and 830 BC, during the Middle Preclassic period (roughly 1000 to 400 BC) in…
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