Monte Albán

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They took the top off a mountain. Around 500 BCE, at the close of the phase archaeologists call Rosario, people from across the Valley of Oaxaca climbed a steep, defensible ridge that no one had lived on before and began to cut it flat — shaving the summit down, hauling away the rubble, packing the leveled ground until a bare hilltop some 400 meters above the valley floor had become a single artificial platform. On that platform, before it was even finished, they set the first monuments. Not a temple. Not a shrine. A wall of carved stone slabs showing naked human figures with closed eyes and slack, twisted limbs, more than three hundred of them, the earliest sustained sculpture in the Zapotec world. The mountain was made a stage and the stage was dressed first with the dead.

The place would govern the valley for a thousand years, and its builders never wrote down the name they gave it. By the time anyone thought to ask, there was no one left on the summit to answer.

The mountain unmade

The Zapotec are the Be’ena’a, the Binniza — the Cloud People — and the mountain-capital they raised is the oldest true city in this part of Mesoamerica. Its own ancient name is genuinely unknown. The site was abandoned centuries before the earliest colonial chronicles, and no ethnohistoric source preserves what its founders called it; Monte Albán is a later Spanish name of uncertain origin, perhaps for a Spaniard named Montalbán, perhaps for the white blossom of the trees on the hill, and neither explanation is secure. What the record can fix, it fixes precisely. The ridge stands at about 1,940 meters above sea level, roughly 400 meters over the floor of the valley, in the municipality of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, on the western edge of the modern city of Oaxaca de Juárez. Its coordinates are 17.0439° N, 96.7678° W. Below it the three arms of the great valley — Etla to the northwest, Tlacolula to the east, the Valle Grande to the south — open out from beneath the hill like the spokes of a wheel, and the hill sits almost exactly where they meet.

The modern understanding of the place rests on two long campaigns of fieldwork. From 1931 the Mexican archaeologist Alfonso Caso dug the summit for eighteen seasons, and out of the pottery he recovered he built the ceramic chronology still in use: Monte Albán I through V, a sequence of phases running from the founding around 500 BCE down to the Postclassic and the Spanish arrival in 1521. Four decades later Richard Blanton and his colleagues walked the whole hill and its terraces on foot, mapping every visible mound in a full settlement survey, and it was that survey that recovered the sheer scale of the thing. The founders had not simply built a citadel; they had converged on an empty hilltop, from villages scattered across a valley that had held no single capital before, and pooled their labor into one place. Population climbed steeply from the start — to around 5,200 by the Monte Albán Ia phase near 300 BCE, and to an estimated 17,200 by the Terminal Formative around 100 BCE, an urban concentration without precedent in the region. The Wikipedia synthesis of the survey data and Caso’s phases lays the figures out plainly, and behind them stands a political fact: this was the seat of the first Zapotec state, a literate, calendar-keeping polity that grew up on a leveled mountain and ran the valley from its height.

Why a hilltop with no water and no farmland, in the middle of a valley people had always farmed from its floor? The question has no settled answer. Defense is part of it; so is neutrality, a fresh unclaimed ground on which the valley’s competing communities could combine without any one of them ceding its own town. But the choice was also, plainly, an assertion. To decide that the center of the world would sit on top of a mountain, and then to unmake the mountain until it could hold the center, is a statement before it is an engineering problem.

The stone dancers

What the builders made of the summit is what the UNESCO World Heritage listing calls a “sacred topography.” The phrase is exact. Over the centuries the terraces, dams, canals, pyramids and artificial mounds of Monte Albán were, in UNESCO’s words, “literally carved out of the mountain,” so that the whole apparatus of a city — its drainage, its residential platforms, its ceremonial core — was cut from the living rock of the hill it stood on. At the heart of it lay the Gran Plaza, the Main Plaza: a rectangular court roughly 300 meters by 150, flattened and paved and framed on every side by platforms and stairways, large enough to gather the population of the state in one place for the public rites of the calendar. The plaza is the city’s argument in stone. A mountain that had divided the valley into watersheds was reshaped into a single flat clearing where the valley could stand together and watch.

The earliest and strangest of its monuments are the ones the Spanish, coming on them centuries after the city was dead, called the Danzantes — “the dancers.” There are over three hundred of them, low reliefs of the Monte Albán I period showing naked human figures in contorted attitudes, limbs bent, heads thrown back, eyes shut, some with glyphs cut beside them. The “dancer” reading was a colonial misapprehension, and it has not survived the scholarship. The figures are not dancing. Most researchers now read them as captives — bound, tortured, or slain war-prisoners, defeated lords displayed in the earliest walls of the plaza as a monumental language of dominion. The Metropolitan Museum’s account of the site’s sacred architecture places them among the first assertions of the new capital’s power, and their style carries an older debt: the swelling, rubbery bodies and the particular treatment of the mouth recall the Olmec sculpture of the Gulf Coast, whose visual language the Zapotec inherited and turned to their own use. The precise meaning of any one slab is contested — whether a given figure is a specific historical captive, a generic prisoner, or something else drawn from the vocabulary of rulership and sacrifice — but the general reading is firm, and the picturesque “dancer” is a name to be recorded and set aside. That a city should announce itself with three hundred images of the defeated, before it raised a single temple on the new plaza, is the plainest thing the earliest stones say about what the place was for.

The human sacrifice implied by such a program was real, and it belongs in the record as the record has it — soberly, in context, without spectacle. In a state whose power was measured in the towns and lords it could break, the display of the broken was itself an instrument of rule, and the danzantes are that instrument set permanently in stone.

The Gran Plaza of Monte Albán, the artificially leveled ceremonial court roughly 300 by 150 meters, framed by platforms cut from the mountain. Photograph by DavidConFran, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The arrowhead and the count

If the danzantes belong to the city’s first century, the strangest building on the plaza belongs to its second. In Monte Albán II, around the turn of the era, the builders raised a structure unlike anything else on the summit: an arrowhead, a squat pentagonal mound with a pointed prow, set at an angle that breaks the plaza’s otherwise strict north–south grid. Archaeologists call it Building J. Its long axis is skewed some 45 degrees off the alignment of everything around it, and the deviation is not an accident of terrain. In 1972 the astronomer Anthony Aveni, working with Robert Linsley, argued that the building was oriented to the sky — that its stairway faced the point on the horizon where the bright star Capella rose heliacally, at the latitude of Monte Albán, at the season when the sun stood directly overhead at noon. Later analysts have corrected and complicated the specific star-sighting, and the exact target of the “pointer” is debated; but the broad conclusion has held. Building J is bound up with astronomy and the calendar, most likely a temple built to the count of days, its odd angle a way of fixing the plaza to the turning of the heavens.

Set into its walls are more than forty carved slabs, and these carry the building’s second puzzle. Each bears a place-glyph — the name-sign of a town — surmounted, on many of them, by an inverted human head. Caso read the series as a roll of conquest: a register of the towns Monte Albán had subdued, each named community capped by the upside-down head of its defeated lord, the whole building a stone gazetteer of empire. Others have read the same slabs differently, as a list of allied or tributary communities rather than conquered ones, or as a record whose logic is more ritual than military. The reading is genuinely contested, and the honest description holds both possibilities open: a register of places, tied to the language of domination, whose precise political meaning the glyphs have not yet been made to yield.

Around this axis the rest of the ceremonial core resolves into order. The Gran Plaza is closed at either end by a massive platform — the North Platform, the largest single construction on the site, a raised acropolis of temples and sunken courts, and the lower South Platform opposite it. Down the middle run a spine of small temple-mounds and, tucked against the plaza’s western side, an I-shaped ballcourt, its sloping benches framing the court for the ritual game played across Mesoamerica. And beneath the platforms and the elite residences lie the tombs. Monte Albán is honeycombed with them — masonry chambers, some with painted facades and antechambers, the finest of them frescoed with processions of figures, in which the great families of the city buried their dead. Set with those dead were the gray-ware funerary urns for which the site is famous: seated effigy vessels whose modeled faces carry the fanged jaguar-serpent mask of Cocijo, the lightning-lord of the four quarters, the storm made a person, whose rain the valley’s maize depended on. The urns place the source of the year’s water at the threshold of the ancestors. The mountaintop was a house of the dead as much as a seat of the living state, and the two functions were never separate: the lords who ruled the valley from the plaza were buried under it, watched over by the god of the storm.

One of the danzantes — over three hundred Monte Albán I reliefs of naked, contorted figures, long miscalled “dancers” and now read as slain or captive war-prisoners. Photograph by HJPD, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

To read the whole summit together is to see a single design a thousand years in the working: a mountain flattened into a plaza, the plaza fixed to the sky by an arrowhead of stone, its walls set with the conquered and its floors laid over the dead, the storm-god’s mask keeping watch from the urns in the tombs. The INAH site record catalogs the standing monuments; the design that binds them is the argument of a state that ran a valley from a height it had built by hand.

After the state

The state did not last. Through the Late Classic, between roughly 500 and 750 CE, Monte Albán lost its grip on the valley; the population that had concentrated on the hill drained back out to the valley towns, and by around 900 to 1000 CE the great capital was largely abandoned, its plaza empty, its ballcourt silent, centuries before either the Aztec or the Spanish ever reached Oaxaca. The Zapotec themselves did not vanish — they are a living people still, in the valley and the sierra, speaking a living language — but their mountain-city was over, dissolved as a political center while the Postclassic was still young. The fuller history of the conquest and of the long colonial campaign against Zapotec religion belongs with the account of the Zapotec people; Monte Albán had been a ruin for six hundred years before any of it began.

Its tombs, though, kept working after its rulers were gone. In the Postclassic the incoming Nuu Savi, the Mixtec — the People of the Rain, moving into the old Zapotec country from the western highlands — reopened one of the emptied Zapotec chambers, Tomb 7, and used it for a burial of their own. What they left in it Alfonso Caso found on 9 January 1932, tunneling in through the wall of an overlying residence, and it remains one of the richest funerary deposits ever recovered in the Americas. The Monte Albán Heritage Center’s account of Tomb 7 records more than five hundred objects — worked bone, jade and greenstone, turquoise mosaics, rock crystal, jet, pearl and shell — and among them nearly 121 pieces of gold: breastplates and a famous pectoral, rings, bells, tweezers, a diadem, all of it the work of Mixtec goldsmiths who were the finest metalworkers of central and southern Mexico. The find made the front pages; it gave a young Mexican archaeology a spectacular emblem of its own deep past, and it settled Caso’s reputation. The treasure is now the heart of Sala III of the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca, in the great former convent of Santo Domingo, some nine kilometers east of the ruins in the city of Oaxaca de Juárez.

A gold ear ornament from Tomb 7, part of the Mixtec assemblage that a Postclassic burial left in a reused Zapotec chamber, now in Sala III of the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca. Photograph by Anagoria, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

In 1987 UNESCO inscribed the Historic Centre of Oaxaca together with the archaeological site of Monte Albán on the World Heritage List, a single listing joining the colonial city below to the sacred topography above it. The mountaintop now draws a great tide of visitors — 429,702 recorded in 2017 — who climb to the empty plaza to stand where the valley once gathered, and the traffic brings its own pressures, its own commerce in replica urns and reproduced glyphs at the foot of the hill. None of that is the whole of what the place is. For the living Zapotec of Oaxaca the leveled mountain is not a scenic ruin but an ancestral ground, the work of the Cloud People’s own hands and the resting place of their own dead. The city that its founders never named has outlasted the naming: a mountain unmade into a stage, still standing above the valley it was built to hold, with the plaza swept flat and the tombs sealed under it and, from the gray urns gone now to their glass cases, the storm-god still watching for the rain.

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