50 ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCHES IN NICARAGUA. 



pottery in the light earth intervening. There were two sinkers made of broken 

 pottery, one of them somewhat heart-shaped. 



Some three hundred yards south of Luna's house, at a place which we 

 christened Pueblo Viejo, the ditch for a hedge had exposed pottery shards. 

 Besides these, stone implements, bones, &c., were discovered ; all the relics being 

 found immediately below the lava. Fragments of prettily painted pottery were 

 taken out in great numbers. The prevailing colors were red and brown or black 

 laid in broad bands and other designs on a field of buff or yellow. 



Pieces of a mortar of coarse grained basalt and smooth roller or grinder of 

 dolerite were obtained. Near some bones of a human skeleton was a vertebra 

 of a shark, with a hole in its centre, which had possibly been suspended as an 

 ornament. In several places piles of beach stones were arranged as in fire-places 

 for cooking. Everything had the appearance as if a sudden eruption from the 

 volcano had destroyed the huts, broken the utensils of the household, and, in 

 some cases, overtaken the unfortunate inhabitants. The solid lava was uncov- 

 ered for a space of five by seven feet. It was ten inches below the surface and 

 five inches thick, with loose cinder above and below ; while the overlying ten 

 inches was also largely of volcanic cinder. Underlying it was a hard stratum of 

 old ash and pebble. From under this section of lava were taken the shards 

 marked 22,401 (Smithsonian number.) There were great numbers of similar 

 fragments of Santa Helena pottery, but not a piece of the Luna type. 



We have no means of estimating the number of years it must have required 

 for the surface which was covered by this eruption to have become sufficiently 

 changed to allow the gradual formation of the soil, which supported a large and 

 prosperous population at the time of the conquest. There has been no eruption 

 on the island since that time, and Sivers says there is no record of one within 

 the memory of man.* 



SANTA HELENA. 



At a place of this name belonging to the Salgados, on the lake shore, two 

 and a half miles north of Moyogalpa, was found by far the most beautiful pottery 

 obtained. For convenience of reference the name of the hacienda was given to 

 this particular type of ware. In the forest here several large trees had been 

 blown down by the hurricane of October, 1876. Among their roots, and in the 

 cavities formed by their uptearing, were found fragments of the painted pottery 

 discovered before at Pueblo Vicjo. In still greater numbers were shards of 

 unpainted and imperfectly burned earthen-ware, differing from the former both 



* Sivers' Ueber Madeira und die Antillen nach Mittelamerika, page 128. 



