by John Longyear with funding from the Institute of Andean Research. Longyear produced an overview of Salvadoran archaeology, relying heavily on collections but also incorporating results of his own excavations at Los Llanitos and those of Stanley Boggs at Tazumal. Los Llanitos was at the time the easternmost architectural center known in the country. Longyear’s excavations exposed buildings with rough stone walls, including a ball court complex with stone slabs lining the alley. Longyear later compared this ball court to one at Tenampúa in the Comayagua Valley of Central Honduras (Longyear 1966). He also identified the distinctive local polychrome pottery style at Los Llanitos, wrongly, with the Las Vegas pottery style of Comayagua. One of Longyear’s concerns was to identify the Salvadoran sites with the ethnic groups reported in the sixteenth century. He regarded this task as “difficult in the central and western areas, where successive cultural and linguistic invasions spread over large territories,” but achievable in the east, presumably not so frequently overrun. His equating Los Llanitos with Honduran sites advanced this goal by allowing him to identify the inhabitants of eastern El Salvador as part of the frontier with the Lenca population he attributed to central Honduras.

Boggs’s excavations at Tazumal in extreme western El Salvador proved to be the initial season of a multiyear project, funded by the Salvadoran government, that ended in 1945. He identified construction techniques similar to those of Campana San Andres, and a series of burials encountered during the work served as the basis for a chronological sequence. Boggs suggested two major episodes of occupation separated by abandonment. The earlier episode was associated with pottery that suggested external affiliations with the Maya of Copan, Uaxactun, and Kaminaljuyu. The later construction episode was accompanied by plumbate pottery that Boggs recognized as following the classic Maya in time.

By 1950 Boggs, then chief of the Department of Archaeological Excavations of El Salvador, was able to summarize the chronological picture of the country, relying on his own work at Tazumal and Lothrop and Lardé’s results from Cerro Zapote, as consisting of three major periods of occupation corresponding to Spinden’s archaic, Mayan, and post-Mayan phases. He further subdivided the Mayan period into three phases of 100 or 200 years each based on construction sequence, superposition of burials, and the cross-dating of ceramics with Mayan sites to the west. He ended his review with an outline of a long-range systematic plan for addressing what he saw as major problems. These included gaps in the sequence, whether due to local abandonment of the sites dug or ignorance of a general emigration from the whole area, and the applicability of his proposed sequence to eastern El Salvador. Boggs’s proposed strategy would have involved constructing chronologies for both western and eastern El Salvador by excavating at larger sites, which he presumed would be more likely to yield long sequences of occupation. This work would be complemented by the excavation of small sites in the area between these extremes to check for the presence and co-occurrence of traits diagnostic of the eastern and western sequences.

This goal had yet to be achieved when Longyear wrote a synthesis for the Handbook of Middle American Indians (1966). In it, Longyear asserted that the country was really divided into two regions by the Lempa River. Although he presented this division in geographic terms, the influence of Lothrop’s (1939) definition of the Lempa as the location of the Mesoamerican frontier is obvious. The same idea, the notion of a cultural frontier between distinct eastern and western Salvadoran cultures, was implicit in Boggs’s suggested strategy for Salvadoran archaeology. Longyear, as he had in his earlier monograph, supported the separation of these two regions through reference to sixteenth-century accounts of the distribution of ethnic groups in the country. The west he identified as the land of the Pokomam Maya, displaced shortly before the Spanish conquest by Pipil, and the Chorti Maya. East of the Lempa were the Lenca, a population that extended into Honduras to the north. Longyear presented his entire survey in terms of this fundamental division of El Salvador between two ethnic groups.

For western El Salvador, Longyear sketched a dynamic prehistory of population displacements