Abstract The volcanic eruption that buried Cerén, El Salvador, ata.d.590 preserved an extraordinary array of artifacts and features in or near their original positions. Household inventories are virtually complete, and activities can be reconstructed in almost ethnographic detail. It is therefore tempting to think that Cerén will automatically make less-well-preserved contexts at similar sites more explicable. This proposition is tested by comparing Cerén with a well-excavated set of household remains from seven small rural sites in the Copan Valley, Honduras, which have been much more heavily transformed by cultural and natural processes. Comparison is especially attractive because both the Cerén and Copan sites were small domestic places with similar social, residential, and economic functions. Both sets of sites also share a common basic cultural tradition on the southern periphery of Mesoamerica, and are in reasonably similar upland environmental settings.
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