The History of Monte Alban

Fifteen hundred years of occupation on one levelled ridge, and ninety years of excavation to work out what happened on it. This is the story the stones do not tell on their own, which is also the reason most visitors take a Monte Alban tour rather than walk it cold.

Why anyone builds a city on a ridge with no water

The site was founded around 500 BC on a ridge standing some 400 metres above the floor of the Valley of Oaxaca, at the point where the valley's three arms meet. Nothing about the location is convenient. There is no spring on the summit, no farmland on the slope and no natural defence that a lower hill would not also have given.

What the ridge does have is a view of all three arms at once, and a position that belongs to none of the settlements already in them. The founding looks less like a settlement decision than a political one: a capital placed on neutral ground above the communities it was meant to bind together. The terraces, dams and canals that made living there possible were cut out of the mountain itself, and they are as much a part of the monument as the buildings on top.

Monte Alban I and II: the carved stones and the conquest slabs

The earliest phase, running roughly from 500 to 300 BC, produced the carvings the site is best known for. Over three hundred of the stones now called Los Danzantes have been recorded, and for a long time they were read as dancers because of the loose, contorted postures. The current reading is far grimmer: tortured or sacrificed war captives, several of them identified by name.

The following phase, from about 100 BC to AD 200, produced Building J — an arrowhead in plan, set at an angle to everything else on the plaza, and carrying more than forty carved slabs. Alfonso Caso read those slabs as records of conquered places: a glyph naming the settlement, set above an inverted head. Whether the list is a record of victories or a claim to them is still argued over, but as a statement of reach it is unambiguous.

The capital years: thirty-five thousand people on the terraces

From the beginning of the common era until roughly AD 800 this was the Zapotec capital, and at its height something like 35,000 people lived here. Almost none of them lived on the plaza. The population occupied the terraced slopes below it, in houses cut into stepped platforms that ring the whole hill and are still visible from the air.

That distinction matters when you stand on the summit. The ceremonial core is what survives above ground and what a visitor walks through, but it was the smaller part of the city: a civic and religious stage set above a residential mountain.

Teotihuacan, and what happened when the link broke

Through the Early Classic the connection with Teotihuacan, far to the north, shows in the architecture, in the ceramics and in the mural painting. It was not a conquest in either direction so much as a relationship between two capitals, and it left marks on both.

At the end of the Early Classic the link breaks. Teotihuacan itself was in trouble, and the effect on Oaxaca was immediate enough to be visible in the archaeological record. What followed at Monte Alban was not collapse but a long change of character, and the buildings raised afterwards look inward rather than outward.

The end, around AD 800, and what "abandoned" means here

By about AD 800 the capital had stopped functioning as one. The plaza was no longer maintained, monumental building ceased, and the population dispersed into the valley below, where new centres grew. That is the sense in which the site was abandoned: the institution ended rather than the people vanishing.

The hill was never entirely empty afterwards. It kept a role as a burial place and a place of memory for centuries, which is the thread that leads to the single most famous discovery made here.

The Mixtecs, and the tomb they reused

In the Postclassic the Mixtecs, moving into the valley from the north-west, used the old Zapotec hill for their own dead. They built almost nothing here. What they did was reopen a tomb cut centuries earlier and put one of their own elite into it, with an offering.

That offering, found in Tomb 7, is among the richest ever recovered in Mesoamerica: worked gold, turquoise, jade, rock crystal, pearl and carved bone, sealed in a chamber that had been Zapotec long before the people who filled it arrived. The objects are not on the ridge. They are the reason the site has a place in every history of Mexican archaeology, and they are why a great many visitors arrive expecting to see treasure on the plaza and find carved stone instead.

Alfonso Caso and ninety years of digging

The modern understanding of the site begins in 1931, when Alfonso Caso started work on the monumental core with Ignacio Bernal and Jorge Acosta. The ceramic chronology that team built is still the framework everything else hangs on, and the five phases in the table above are theirs. In 1932 Caso opened Tomb 7.

Two later generations changed the question being asked. From the late 1960s Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus worked on the origins of the whole valley system rather than on the monuments alone. From the early 1970s Richard Blanton's settlement-pattern survey walked the terraces and established how large the city actually was — the finding that turned a ceremonial centre into a city of tens of thousands.

World Heritage, and what is still open

The site was inscribed by UNESCO on 11 December 1987, jointly with the historic centre of Oaxaca, under four cultural criteria. The protected zone covers 2,078 hectares and reaches into four municipalities, which is a reminder that the monument is the whole hill and not the plaza on top of it.

Plenty remains unsettled. Whether Building J's slabs record conquests or claim them, how far the Teotihuacan relationship ran in each direction, and why a working capital was allowed to stop working are all live questions. That is worth knowing before you go: the guides on the good tours will tell you what is established and what is argued, and the difference between the two is most of the interest.