Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2006 - 33

tions of ancient El Salvador can be
fitted into their proper position in
Central American history and their
cultural attainments, behavior, and
contributions to human life."
Boggs worked at Tazumal for 13
seasons, until 1955, and, except for
visits to the United States which
lasted up to a few years at a time,
lived in El Salvador for the rest of his
life. He "went local," as his American
colleagues said, becoming chief of
archaeology at the National Museum
and later holding the same title in the
Stanley Boggs holds an eccentric flint,a Maya
Office of Cultural Patrelic associated with lightning.Hislife'swork governments
a
came undone with the partial collapse of the rimony, position that gave him final
smaller pyramid,seen below in 2004before authority over all archaeological digs in
workers stripped off much of the concrete he the country, including his own.
had erected.
"He was the archaeologist in El
Salvador, the person you would go to
if you had any problem," says Payson
Sheets, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado, who met Boggs
in El Salvador in 1969.
Sheets and others remember Boggs
as a gruff, disciplined man at work but
a charming companion when relaxed.
He adored marimba music and inviting colleagues over for dinners of
Salvadoran food and his trademark
drink, el atomico, an ultra-chilled,
3 ultra-dry martini. Colleagues recall
"3his time in El Salvador as a
bygone
oc
U
as
of
with
era
bonhomie,
Boggs a kind
Sr
benevolent
of
patron over the tiny
o
U
nations incipient archaeology.
r .i
With excavation or tne two main pyramids nearly complete,
to travelers since the nineteenth century, the sites dominant
feature was an oval-shaped central pyramid-mound, which
Boggs began what he thought would be the restoration of
Tazumal
for the ages. He hired a work crew that reportedly
with
the
to
be
two
structures,
space
Boggs correctly perceived
numbered about 100 men - photographs from the era show
between them filled in with soil and debris. Cows grazed on
it, and local workers had been extracting soil from the top of
up to 25 working at one time - to fabricate concrete blocks
it for years to make adobe bricks.
directly on the site and then erect them over the pyramids'
Tazumal proved unexpectedly rich. Boggss accounts vividly
stonework, affixing the blocks to the structure with mortar.
of
the
uncovered
the
Records show that he made concrete with a mix of sand,
enthusiasm
as
he
his
complexity
convey
site s architecture and its wealth of objects- Maya stone carvcement, an acrylic latex substance known as Rhoplex E-330,
an anti-foaming agent called Nopco NYZ, and water. The
ings and gorgeous painted vases. Tazumal was "an immensely
cost of the project is not known but most of the ingredients
and
altered
series
of
buildings
superimposed
complicated
1 found to have been built up over a period of approximately 600
had to be imported, and Boggs had strong support from the
M
t
-o
Salvadoran government, then run by a series of military strongc years," he wrote in a 1950 paper published by the Hohokam
he
his
men.
of
Tucson.
In
1944
and
Association
Museums
alone,
They were eager to give the country a flagship ancient
i"õ
site as Mexico had done with Teotihuacán. "There was a great
« team found 116 ceramic vases, three metal objects, more than
interest in the glories of the pas and all that," said Valdivieso.
1 600 jadeite decorations, and the remains of 12 people who
"I think he erected the concrete as a response to peoples
s3 had been laid to rest inside the main pyramid. Tazumal was
Si
3
expectations about what the site should look like."
S no mere Maya outpost but a major ceremonial center. Along
From Boggss standpoint, there may have been little choice.
with a dozen or so nearby sites that he called the Chalchuapa
Ies
Built over centuries with stone and adobe, the structures
CUArchaeological Zone, Tazumal would reveal how "the civilizawas raised on a farm in
Indiana and studied at NorthBoggs western University and later
the University of Arizona, where he
received a masters degree in anthropology. When he first came to El
Salvador in 1940 the country offered
unbelievable opportunities for an
energetic digger- a landscape dotted
with overgrown hillocks that were, in
fact, untouched ancient ruins. Boggs
soon married a Salvadoran woman,
Inés Sagrera, and began the project
that would occupy him for most of the
next 30 years: the study of Tazumal, a
complex of 13 mounds on the edge of
the city of Chalchuapa on the southeastern fringe of the Maya heartland
near the Guatemalan border. Known

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Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2006

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