Ceren is an agricultural village in El Salvador that was buried in ash nearly fourteen centuries ago. Ceren is registered as a UN Heritage site and has been called the "Pompeii of the New World." Discovered in 1976 by Payson D. Sheets, an anthropology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and under continuous excavation and study since, Ceren offers exciting opportunities to study household archaeology. In 1995 the Sundance Laboratory began to explore the use of visualization and computer modeling to represent and understand archaeological data at Ceren.

The following pages are experiments using computer models, movies, QTVR, Shockwave and Java to display and describe material from Ceren. Our goal is to develop innovative ways to combine computer graphics modeling, the World Wide Web, and multimedia database technologies to deliver an exciting on-line learning resource. To view this site you will need all of the plug-ins described on the previous page. The pop-up menu will guide you through the site.


In addition to the HTML content, Field Specimen lists are available on this CD-ROM in spreadsheet format for each of the nine operations at the Ceren site since sustained research began in 1989. Each artifact, sample of construction material, soil sample, pollen sample, thatch sample, bunch of seeds, sample of pigment, sample of roofing thatch, sample of tephra, or other item recovered from anywhere in the site receives a FS number. Implicit in each number is the site number (295-), next is the operation number (1 thru 9), and the final number is of the item itself. The list should not be considered frozen, as (for example) sometimes numbers are combined when the ceramicist is able to fit sherds together that turn out to be a single vessel but in the field the sherds were collected into two separate FS numbers. And, as conservation is done to objects, information is added in that column, and as analyses yield specific results that too can be included into the FS list in the future. Hence it is best seen as evolving and improving through time, and this list as presented here is current to summer 1998.


Ceren anthropological site acknowledgments.


The Ceren Web Resource:

Developed by: Jen S. Lewin , Mark A. Ehrhardt

Faculty Advisors: Mark D. Gross, Payson D. Sheets.

The Ceren Web Resouce was developed at the Sundance Laboratory for Computing in Design and Planning, a joint project between the University of Colorado College of Architecture and Planning and the Department of Anthropology.

For more information on Ceren contact Payson Sheets.
For more information on the multimedia site contact Mark Gross.

Special Thanks To:

College of Architecture and Planning (undergraduate) student team:
Matthew Bayless, Justin Call, Ethan deFrees, Judy Hodge, Mary Jannik, Ian Page-Echols, Steve Perce, Natat Poomviset and Eric Sommerfeld.

CD ROM conversion: Peter Kappus

Department of Anthropology doctoral students: Linda Brown and Scott Simmons.

University of Colorado office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs, David Groth.

CU Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).

University of Colorado, President's Initiative Fund for Teaching Technology.