A Day in the Life of the Diviner in Joya de Ceren

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust: The Archaeology of El Salvador" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Structure 12 at Joya de Ceren was dedicated to divination. The extraordinary preservation, and emergency evacuation of the village, left the diviner’s supernatural toolkit and other materials in their original locations. That provides an almost ethnographic opportunity to reconstruct the diviner’s interactions with a client, and the process of conducting the divination. The gifts left for services rendered were female-associated, such as spindle whorls and food processing tools, hence my assumption of gender. She entered her structure by opening a double-thick pole door only 90cm high, and crawling in, symbolic of entering a different domain. She discussed the issue with her client through a lattice window in the front wall. If they agreed, she turned and went to a niche under a bench to her supernatural toolkit. She would grab beans or minerals to cast in the divination. She would step up into two more innermost rooms to the large back room to do her casting. After ‘reading’ the pattern, she would give her results through another lattice window. Because of the differential elevations, her client would receive her words from above. The divination was complete.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust: The Archaeology of El Salvador

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50484