Monte Albán

Monte Albán is the ruin of an ancient Zapotec city on a levelled ridge in the Valley of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, about nine kilometres west of modern Oaxaca City. Founded around 500 BCE, it was one of the earliest cities in Mesoamerica and for nearly a thousand years the leading political and economic centre of the Zapotec people. At its height it ruled much of the Oaxacan highlands, before it was largely abandoned around 900–1000 CE. Its ancient name is unknown, and even the origin of its Spanish name is uncertain.

Before 500 BCE the ridge seems to have been empty. The valley below was divided among rival chiefdoms, the largest based at San José Mogote in the northern Etla arm, and the archaeological evidence points to competition and warfare between them. Monte Albán was founded in the no-man's land between these territories, on a hilltop about 400 metres above the valley floor that was easy to defend. It grew very fast, to an estimated 5,200 people by about 300 BCE, while San José Mogote declined at the same time, which suggests that its leaders helped to found the new centre. Not every chiefdom joined: excavations at Tilcajete in the south show that it grew in this period and may have resisted absorption.

The oldest carved monuments, the more than 300 so-called Danzantes, show naked men in twisted poses. Nineteenth-century observers took them for dancers, but they are now generally understood as captives who had been tortured or sacrificed, some identified by name, perhaps leaders of rival communities.

By about 100 BCE to 200 CE the city had some 17,200 people and was among the largest in Mesoamerica. It expanded through war, alliance and colonisation into areas beyond the valley, such as the Cañada de Cuicatlán in the north, where archaeologists have confirmed Zapotec conquest. More than 40 carved slabs set into the arrow-shaped Building J in the main plaza show place names, often with upside-down heads; Alfonso Caso identified them as a list of places the city claimed to have conquered.

The centre of the city was the Main Plaza, roughly 300 by 150 metres, created by flattening the mountaintop and plastering it white, and lined with temples, elite houses and a ballcourt. Ordinary people lived in adobe houses on hundreds of terraces down the slopes, farming land where water was scarce. Through the Early Classic, roughly 200 to 500 CE, Monte Albán remained the capital of a major regional power, and its elite had high-level contacts with Teotihuacan in central Mexico, where a neighbourhood of Zapotecs from Oaxaca has been identified.

In the Late Classic, from about 500 CE, the city's influence waned as subject centres such as Zaachila, Lambityeco and Mitla asserted their independence. By around 900–1000 CE the capital was largely deserted, and the valley was divided among dozens of competing small states until the Spanish arrived in 1521. The ridge was never wholly forgotten. People came back on a small scale, reused old buildings and tombs, and performed rituals there into the Spanish colonial period. In Tomb 7, a Classic Zapotec tomb reused for Mixtec nobles in Postclassic times, Caso found in 1932 one of the richest burial offerings known from the Americas.

Visible from across the central valley, the ruins drew visitors throughout the colonial and modern eras. Guillermo Dupaix investigated them in the early nineteenth century, and Leopoldo Batres, the Mexican government's inspector of monuments, carried out the first intensive exploration in 1902. Large-scale scientific excavation began only in 1931 under Caso, who with Ignacio Bernal and Jorge Acosta worked for some eighteen years, reconstructing much of what is visible today and establishing the pottery sequence still used to date the site. From the 1970s Richard Blanton and colleagues mapped the whole site and then the entire valley, revealing the city's full size. Many finds are now in the national museum in Mexico City and the regional museum in Oaxaca.

In 1987 UNESCO inscribed the Historic Centre of Oaxaca and Archaeological Site of Monte Albán on the World Heritage List. The site drew about 430,000 visitors in 2017. Its main threat is the growth of the surrounding city, which is spreading onto land of archaeological value, and protection is complicated because the site is divided among four municipalities.