Monte Albán

Monte Albán is a large pre-Columbian archaeological site in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, on a low mountainous range rising above the central part of the Valley of Oaxaca. The civic ceremonial center sits atop an artificially leveled ridge at an elevation of about 1,940 m (6,400 ft), rising some 400 m (1,300 ft) from the valley floor in an easily defensible location. Oaxaca City lies approximately 9 km (6 mi) to the east. Several hundred artificial terraces and a dozen clusters of mounded architecture cover the ridgeline and surrounding flanks.

Founded toward the end of the Middle Formative period at around 500 BC, Monte Albán was one of the earliest cities of Mesoamerica and for nearly one thousand years the pre-eminent Zapotec socio-political and economic center. The hills appear to have been uninhabited before 500 BCE, and the city was founded in an unoccupied buffer zone between rival chiefdoms. It reached a population estimate of around 5,200 by c. 300 BCE, while San José Mogote declined.

By the Terminal Formative (c. 100 BC – AD 200) it was the capital of an expansionist polity, with an estimated population of 17,200, making it one of the largest Mesoamerican cities of the time. It expanded militarily, through cooption and by colonization into areas such as the Cañada de Cuicatlán, and had high-level contacts with Teotihuacan, where archaeologists have identified a neighbourhood of ethnic Zapotecs. It lost its political pre-eminence by the end of the Late Classic (c. AD 500–750) and was soon largely abandoned, though small-scale reoccupation and ritual visitations continued into the Colonial period.

The ancient Zapotec name of the city is not known, and the origin of the present name is unclear. Suggestions range from a corruption of a native Zapotec name to a reference to a Spanish soldier named Montalbán or to the Alban Hills of Italy.

Guillermo Dupaix investigated the site in the early 19th century, and Leopoldo Batres made the first intensive exploration in 1902. Large-scale excavations began in 1931 under Alfonso Caso, with Ignacio Bernal and Jorge Acosta, uncovering many structures and hundreds of tombs and establishing a ceramic chronology of phases Monte Albán I through V. In the early 1970s a survey led by Richard Blanton mapped the entire site and showed its full scale beyond the area Caso explored.

Being visible from anywhere in the central part of the Valley of Oaxaca, the impressive ruins of Monte Albán attracted visitors and explorers throughout the colonial and modern eras. Among others, Guillermo Dupaix investigated the site in the early 19th century CE, J. M. García published a description of the site in 1859, and A. F. Bandelier visited and published further descriptions in the 1890s. A first intensive archaeological exploration of the site was conducted in 1902 by Leopoldo Batres, then General Inspector of Monuments for the Mexican government under Porfirio Diaz.

It was not until 1931 that large-scale scientific excavations were undertaken, under the direction of Mexican archaeologist Alfonso Caso. In 1933, Eulalia Guzmán assisted with the excavation of Tomb 7. Over the following eighteen years, Caso and his colleagues Ignacio Bernal and Jorge Acosta excavated large sections within the monumental core of the site. Much of what is visible today in areas open to the public was reconstructed at that time. Besides resulting in the excavation of a large number of residential and civic-ceremonial structures and hundreds of tombs and burials, one lasting achievement of the project by Caso and his colleagues was the establishment of a ceramic chronology (phases Monte Albán I through V) for the period between the site's founding in c. 500 BCE to end of the Postclassic period in CE 1521.

The investigation of the periods preceding Monte Albán's founding was a major focus in the late 1960s of the Prehistory and Human Ecology Project started by Kent Flannery of the University of Michigan. Over the following two decades, this project documented the development of socio-political complexity in the valley from the earliest Archaic period (c. 8000–2000 BCE) to the Rosario phase (700–500 BCE) immediately preceding Monte Albán. It set the stage for an understanding of the latter's founding and developmental trajectory. In this context, among the major accomplishments of Flannery's work in Oaxaca are his extensive excavations at the important formative center of San José Mogote in the Etla branch of the valley, a project co-directed with Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan.

A further important step in the understanding of the history of occupation of the Monte Albán site was reached with the Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Valley of Oaxaca Project begun by Richard Blanton and several colleagues from the University of Michigan in the early 1970s. Their intensive survey and mapping of the entire site demonstrated the full scale and size of Monte Albán, beyond the limited area which had been explored by Caso. Subsequent seasons of the same project under the direction of Blanton, Gary Feinman, Steve Kowalewski, Linda Nicholas, and others extended the survey coverage to practically the entire valley, producing an invaluable amount of data on the region's changing settlement patterns from the earliest times to the arrival of the Spanish in CE 1521.