Monte Albán: Founding of the Zapotec Capital of Oaxaca

Monte Albán is the ancient Zapotec city built on a levelled mountain ridge above the Valley of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. Founded around 500 BC, it grew into one of the first true cities of Mesoamerica and the political capital of the Zapotec people for more than a thousand years. Its carved stones, including the famous Danzantes, preserve some of the earliest writing in the Americas.

Background: the Valley of Oaxaca before the city

The Valley of Oaxaca is a high, Y-shaped valley in the mountains of southern Mexico, with three arms meeting near modern Oaxaca City. Farming villages growing maize, beans and squash had spread through it by the second millennium BC. By about 1000 BC one village, San José Mogote in the northern arm, had become the largest community, with public buildings and long-distance contacts reaching the Olmec world of the Gulf Coast.

Over the next centuries the valley divided into several rival chiefdoms. Archaeologists have found evidence of conflict: burned temples, a buffer zone of empty land between groups and carvings of defeated enemies. One stone at San José Mogote, known as Monument 3, shows a slain captive with a glyph that appears to give his name in calendar form. It is often dated to around 600–500 BC, although its exact date is debated.

The founding of Monte Albán

Around 500 BC a new settlement appeared on a group of hills rising about 400 metres above the valley floor, at the point where the three arms of the valley meet. The summit had no permanent water source and was not good farmland, yet within a short time it held thousands of people. At the same moment, San José Mogote and several other valley centres shrank sharply.

Many archaeologists, notably Richard Blanton, Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery, interpret this as a deliberate founding. In their view the leaders of several valley communities joined together and moved to a neutral, defensible site to create a new capital, a process sometimes compared to the Greek idea of synoecism, the merging of villages into one city. Other scholars stress conflict and conquest instead. What is clear is that by about 300 BC Monte Albán was the dominant place in the valley, with an estimated population of several thousand people, perhaps 5,000 or more.

The builders levelled the ridge top to create the Main Plaza, an open space roughly 300 metres long and about 150–200 metres wide. Over the following centuries platforms, temples, palaces and a ball court were raised around it. Defensive walls were later built on the more accessible slopes.

The Danzantes and early writing

The most famous monuments of the early city are the Danzantes. More than 300 carved stone slabs show naked men with closed eyes and open mouths, their limbs twisted in awkward positions. Some have flowing scroll-like designs from the groin, interpreted as blood. Nineteenth-century visitors called them “dancers”, and the name stuck.

Today most scholars read them as images of slain or sacrificed enemies. They were set into the walls of an early building, now called Building L, where they would have been seen by anyone entering the plaza. The message was political: the new city displayed its defeated rivals in stone.

Some of the Danzantes, and nearby Stelae 12 and 13, carry short hieroglyphic texts. These include day signs from the 260-day ritual calendar and numbers written with bars and dots. Together with San José Mogote Monument 3, they make Zapotec script one of the oldest writing systems in Mesoamerica. Other early Mesoamerican writing is discussed in our article on the Cascajal Block. The Zapotec script has never been fully deciphered, partly because surviving texts are short.

Growth into a regional capital

During Monte Albán II, roughly 100 BC to AD 200, the city’s influence spread beyond the valley. Building J, an unusual arrow-shaped structure set at an angle to the other buildings in the Main Plaza, carries more than 40 carved stones. Alfonso Caso, who directed excavations from 1931, suggested that these “conquest slabs” named places that Monte Albán had conquered or brought under its control. Each slab combines a hill sign for “place” with a place-name glyph and, often, an upside-down head, which is read as the defeated ruler.

In its Classic period, roughly AD 200 to 700, Monte Albán was at its height. Population estimates for the peak range from about 15,000 to more than 25,000. The city had contacts with Teotihuacan, the great metropolis of central Mexico; carved stones at Monte Albán show visitors in Teotihuacan dress, and an Oaxacan neighbourhood existed at Teotihuacan itself. Elite Zapotecs were buried in painted tombs with urns showing gods and ancestors.

Life on the mountain

Most of Monte Albán’s inhabitants did not live around the Main Plaza. Surveys have mapped more than 2,000 artificial terraces cut into the surrounding slopes, each supporting one or more houses. Because the hilltop had little water and poor soil, food had to be carried up from farms on the valley floor, a sign of how far the city depended on tribute and organised labour from the surrounding countryside.

The city was also a religious centre. Temples stood on platforms around the plaza, and the I-shaped ball court beside it hosted the ritual ball game played across Mesoamerica. Residences of the ruling families were built on the North Platform, the largest complex on the site.

Decline and later history

Between about AD 700 and 900 Monte Albán declined. Its population fell, monumental building stopped and the valley broke up into a number of smaller competing centres such as Lambityeco, Jalieza and later Mitla. Historians suggest that the city lost its purpose as a unifying capital, but no single cause is agreed.

The hilltop was never completely forgotten. In the Postclassic period people reused old tombs. In 1932 Alfonso Caso opened Tomb 7, an earlier Zapotec tomb that had been reused for burials accompanied by a famous treasure of gold, silver, jade and carved bone, generally attributed to Mixtec-period reuse. The find made Monte Albán internationally famous.

Key people

• Zapotec founders: the leaders who created the city are unnamed in any readable text, but their decision shaped the valley for a millennium.
• Alfonso Caso (1896–1970): Mexican archaeologist who led excavations from 1931 and proposed much of the site’s chronology.
• Richard Blanton, Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery: archaeologists whose surveys and excavations in the 1970s and later framed modern debates on the founding of the city.

Timeline

• c. 1000 BC: San José Mogote is the largest village in the Valley of Oaxaca.
• c. 600–500 BC: Monument 3 at San José Mogote shows a slain captive with an early name glyph.
• c. 500 BC: Monte Albán is founded on the hilltop above the valley.
• c. 500–300 BC: The Danzantes are carved and set into Building L.
• c. 100 BC – AD 200: Building J and its “conquest slabs” mark Monte Albán’s regional expansion.
• c. AD 200–700: The city reaches its greatest size and has contacts with Teotihuacan.
• c. AD 700–900: Monte Albán declines and the valley fragments.
• 1932: Alfonso Caso discovers Tomb 7 and its treasure.
• 1987: The site is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List with the historic centre of Oaxaca.

Why it matters

Monte Albán is one of the clearest cases in the Americas of a city being founded rather than slowly growing. Its early carvings show how writing, the calendar and public images of victory were used to build political power. It links the earlier world of the Olmec with the later Classic civilisations of Mesoamerica, and the Zapotec people who built it remain part of Oaxaca today.