Cerro Coroban: A Contact Period Lenca Site in Eastern El Salvador

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Coroban site, located on a highly-defensible summit in Morazán, El Salvador, was occupied by the Poton Lenca. The Lenca inhabited most of eastern El Salvador and western and central Honduras during the early sixteenth century Spanish Conquest. They spoke two or more languages with multiple dialects and belonged to distinct, albeit related, cultures. The Lenca of eastern El Salvador are referred to as Poton. Local oral traditions recorded in the early twentieth century named Coroban as ancestral to Gotera, the modern capital of Morazán department. The inhabitants of Coroban participated in the great pan-Lenca insurrection of 1537 against the Spanish. Although archaeologists have known of Coroban since the 1920s no formal description or map had been published prior to 2015, when the primary and secondary authors visited the site, documenting its surface expression. We examine the archival, oral historical, and archaeological evidence of Coroban, its participation in the 1537 insurrection, and its identification as ancestral to Gotera. We also propose a plan for future investigations to better understand the site. The plan includes archival investigations, fieldwork, artifact analysis, and the study of nearby sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32600