Zapotec civilization

They were not the Maya and they were not the Aztecs. Their civilisation grew out of the maize villages of the Oaxaca Valley, matured without a neighbouring empire to copy, and outlasted both Teotihuacan and the Classic Maya states. When Monte Albán lost its primacy around AD 800, the Zapotec political world did not vanish: it broke into a dozen competing kingdoms, one of which fought the Aztecs to a negotiated peace in the 1490s, and whose lords were still ruling when the Spaniards arrived. Zapotec languages are spoken today by about half a million people, and the city of Oaxaca still carries a Nahuatl name, Huaxyacac, for the guaje groves beside the river.

The name "Zapotec" is an exonym. It comes from Nahuatl tzapotēcah, "people of the sapote", the label the Aztecs used; the Zapotecs called themselves Be'ena'a or Bën za, "cloud people". Everything in this entry that predates the sixteenth century comes from archaeology, because the Zapotec script has never been fully deciphered and no Zapotec book survives. What follows is therefore a history written from excavation trenches, settlement surveys, radiocarbon dates, carved stone and the objects buried with the dead.

At a glance

How did the Valley of Oaxaca produce its first chiefs?

The Valley of Oaxaca is a Y-shaped trough in the Sierra Madre del Sur, about 1,550 metres above sea level, where three broad arms meet: Etla running north-west, Tlacolula east, and the Zimatlán–Ocotlán arm, often called the Valle Grande, to the south. The Atoyac river drains the whole basin southward to the Pacific. The floor is dry for much of the year, the rain comes in a summer season, and the surrounding hills are cut by barrancas that carry water only after storms. It is not an easy place to farm, but it is a good place to farm well: deep alluvial soils along the rivers, a long growing season, and enough altitude variation to spread risk across several ecological zones.

People had lived in the valley for millennia before anything like a town appeared. Guilá Naquitz cave, in the mountains to the east, has yielded early domesticated squash and maize, and by about 1400 BC the valley floor held a scatter of permanent villages with wattle-and-daub houses, storage pits and grinding stones. The Tierras Largas phase settlements were small, perhaps a few dozen people each, but they were tied together by the things that make a shared culture visible: the same pottery shapes, the same figurines, the same taste for marine shell brought up from the coast.

Growth was steady and uneven. By 1150 BC there were roughly twenty-five villages in the valley, and one of them, San José Mogote in the Etla arm, had public buildings when no other settlement did. That monopoly on communal architecture is the archaeologist's usual signal that a chief has appeared. The mechanism is not hard to imagine: a lineage that controls the best-irrigated land can feed more people, host more feasts, bury its dead with more shell and magnetite, and claim a closer relationship with the ancestors who make the rain come.

Two technologies helped. The first was irrigation, both canal systems drawn from the streams and the labour-intensive "pot irrigation" in which water is scooped from shallow wells into planting holes. The second was craft. San José Mogote had access to local iron ore and turned it into polished magnetite mirrors, which it traded as far as the Olmec Gulf Coast, some 400 km away. Mirrors are not food and not tools; they are the kind of prestige object that a chief gives away to bind a client, and their distribution maps the reach of an early chiefly network better than any pottery type.

By the Rosario phase, roughly 700–500 BC, the valley held several competing chiefly centres, not one. San José Mogote dominated Etla; Tilcajete controlled part of the Valle Grande; Yegüih held the Tlacolula arm. Between them lay an empty buffer zone, and the archaeology of that frontier is not peaceful: burned temples, sacrificed captives, settlements on hilltops. This is the world — small, rich, crowded and violent — into which Monte Albán was born.

What was San José Mogote?

San José Mogote is the place to start because it is where the Zapotec story becomes visible in stone. Occupied from about 1500 BC, it grew into the largest settlement in the valley, covering perhaps 60 hectares at its height with a population around 1,000 — half of everyone living in the valley at the time. Its main platform, Mound 1, was built up to about 15 metres, faced with stone and adobe, and rebuilt repeatedly. Around it stood smaller platforms, workshops, kitchens with bell-shaped storage pits, and burials under the floors of houses.

The site has produced a series of "firsts" that Mexican archaeology quotes with pride: the oldest known defensive palisade in Mexico, from about 1300 BC; the earliest use of adobe brick in public architecture, around 850 BC; the earliest evidence of Zapotec writing; and early examples of terraced hillsides, craft specialisation and irrigation. Some of these claims rest on single excavations and single radiocarbon assays and should be held loosely. The pattern they describe is nonetheless clear: San José Mogote was a chiefdom with monumental architecture, long-distance exchange and a hereditary elite, two or three centuries before Monte Albán existed.

The building archaeologists call the "men's house" is one of the more intriguing structures. It was rebuilt many times, and it is oriented about eight degrees west of north — the same orientation as La Venta, the great Olmec centre on the Gulf Coast. That alignment, and Olmec-style motifs on local pottery, have been used to argue that the Oaxaca chiefs were plugged into a Gulf Coast prestige network, importing not just mirrors and shell but ideas about how a sacred building should face the sky.

San José Mogote's most famous object is Monument 3, a carved slab that was set into a doorway as a threshold. It shows a naked man in a contorted pose, his mouth open, blood scrolls around him, and between his feet two glyphs that read as a day name, "1 Earthquake". The usual reading is that this is a sacrificed captive, named by the day of his death or by his calendar name, displayed where every visitor to the shrine would walk over him. The slab is dated to about 600 BC, which would make it the earliest known example of Zapotec writing, and one of the earliest inscriptions in Mesoamerica.

That date, and the interpretation, are both contested. The monument could have been moved and reused, which would break the link between the carving and the building it was found in; the reading "1 Earthquake" as a name rather than an event is plausible but not certain; and the claim to be the oldest writing in Mesoamerica runs into the San Andrés cylinder seal from the Gulf Coast, dated a few decades earlier, and the general problem that early scribes also wrote on wood, cloth and hide, none of which survives in the Oaxaca climate. What is not in doubt is that by 600 BC somebody in the valley was carving calendrical signs next to a human figure, which means there were specialists who knew the calendar and the script, and patrons who wanted their violence recorded.

Around 500 BC San José Mogote lost its primacy. Its population fell sharply, its public buildings stopped being rebuilt, and it became a modest dependent settlement. The reason is the foundation of Monte Albán, 20 km to the south.

Why was Monte Albán founded on a bare hilltop?

Monte Albán is not an obvious place for a city. The ridge rises about 400 metres above the valley floor, with steep slopes on most sides, no permanent water, and only a narrow crest to build on. It was empty before about 500 BC: the survey teams found no earlier occupation on the hill. Yet within two centuries it held more than 5,000 people, and its founders had already levelled the summit into a plaza 300 metres long and 150 wide, built platforms along three sides, and cut a defensive wall across the accessible northern and western approaches.

The standard explanation is Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery's, and it is a story of deliberate, defensive unification. In their reconstruction, the chiefs of San José Mogote, pressed by rivals at Tilcajete and Yegüih, moved their capital to a neutral, easily defended mountain in the buffer zone between the three arms, and dragged much of the Etla population with them. They call the process synoikism, borrowing the Greek word for the amalgamation of villages into a city, and they point to the pottery: early Monte Albán wares are essentially San José Mogote wares, which suggests the same people, or at least the same potters, made the move.

Richard Blanton's model is different in emphasis and, for a long time, was the more influential. In his reading Monte Albán was a "disembedded capital": a new centre created by agreement among several competing chiefly lineages, sited in empty land precisely because no existing lord could claim it, and given a monumental shell that belonged to all of them. The city then attracted population because it offered something the old centres could not — a neutral place to settle disputes, a single market, and a common ritual focus. On this account the mountain was chosen for politics, not for defence.

The evidence has pushed back against both models in interesting ways. Charles Spencer and Elsa Redmond's excavations at Tilcajete found that the site grew, not shrank, during Monte Albán I, which means the founding of the capital did not simply drain the valley of rivals; at least one competitor stayed and probably fought. The defensive wall, the hilltop siting and the burned temples of the Rosario phase all point to real warfare. What seems most likely is a mixture: a new capital founded by a coalition, in a place chosen for defensibility, which then expanded by conquest and colonisation, absorbing some neighbours and subduing others.

Building the place was an enormous labour project. The crest was cut and filled to create a level plaza; the slopes below were terraced, eventually into hundreds of platforms and house terraces; a dam and canal were built on the south-eastern flank to catch water; and the whole complex was aligned, roughly, to the cardinal directions, with the sun's path dictating that most temples face east or west. Monte Albán is the first place in Mesoamerica where one can see a city plan — not a village that grew, but a mountain that was reworked to a design.

Who were the Danzantes?

The Danzantes are the most famous and least understood monuments of Zapotec art: more than 300 carved slabs, mostly from the earliest phase of the city, showing naked men in contorted, sprawling, sometimes inverted poses. Many have their eyes closed, their mouths open, blood scrolls at the throat or groin, and wounds in the abdomen. Several are clearly mutilated. They were set into the walls of a building on the western side of the plaza, in what looks like a deliberate gallery, and they were meant to be seen.

The name is a nineteenth-century mistake. Early travellers, struck by the twisted limbs, called them dancers. Nobody who reads the iconography now believes that: the figures are bound or helpless, and the accompanying glyphs include what appear to be names. The consensus is that they represent sacrificed captives, probably the rulers or nobles of rival centres, displayed as a permanent record of Monte Albán's power. Some are labelled, which suggests the viewer was expected to know who they were — a public gallery of defeated enemies, carved in stone at the entrance to the sacred centre.

There are complications. A few of the poses have been read as ballplayers, and the ballgame was itself a ritual of sacrifice, so the categories may overlap. The facial features of some figures have been called Olmec-looking, which once supported a theory that the Olmecs built Monte Albán; that theory is dead, and the resemblance is better explained by a shared Mesoamerican sculptural vocabulary than by Gulf Coast colonisation. The dating is early — Monte Albán I, so fifth century BC or later — and the corpus has never been fully published, which limits how confidently anyone can talk about sequence or grouping.

What the Danzantes do establish is a political culture. A society that carves 300 images of tortured enemies and sets them in the wall of its main ceremonial building is not a peaceful theocracy of astronomer-priests. It is a state that has decided to make violence visible, and that expects its audience to read the names of the dead.

What did the Zapotecs write?

The Zapotec script is one of the earliest writing systems in Mesoamerica, and it is the one that gets the least attention. It appears in the fifth or sixth century BC, on Monument 3 at San José Mogote and then on the Danzantes and the stelae of Monte Albán. It was carved on stone, painted on tombs and buildings, and almost certainly written on perishable materials that are lost. It reads in columns, top to bottom, and it combines calendrical signs, numerals — bars for five, dots for one — day names, titles and place names.

The system is usually described as logosyllabic, meaning that some signs stand for words and others for syllables, which is how Maya writing works and how the later Mixtec and Aztec systems partly work. Javier Urcid's study argues that the Zapotec script was developed for an early form of Zapotec and later adapted, with increasing use of word signs, as it spread to people who spoke other languages. That is a technical argument with a big implication: the script was not a crude predecessor of Maya writing but a separate solution to the same problem, used by scribes who thought about language.

What can be read is limited. Dates, day names, numbers and some titles are understood; the syntax, the verbs, the poetry are not. This is why Zapotec history before the conquest is a history of buildings and burials rather than of kings and speeches. The stelae at Monte Albán record accessions, marriages and conquests in a formula we can partly parse, but no Zapotec sentence of any length can yet be translated.

The most political use of the script is Building J, the arrow-shaped structure that sits at an angle to the rest of the plaza. More than forty carved slabs were set into its walls, each showing a place sign — a hill with a glyph on top — and, in many cases, a human head. Some heads are upright, some are upside down. Alfonso Caso read them as conquest slabs: the places Monte Albán had subdued, with the heads of their lords, inverted if they had been killed. The identification of individual places is disputed, but the general reading has held up, and at least one of the places named, the Cañada de Cuicatlán to the north, has been confirmed by survey and excavation as a Zapotec conquest.

Building J has a second life as an astronomical instrument. Its axis is aligned to the heliacal rising of Capella, which at that latitude coincided with the day the sun passed directly overhead. The building may have been a zenith observatory, a war memorial, or both. In a state where the king's authority rested on his ability to predict the sky and win the war, those are not separate functions.

The script declined before the state did. By the Late Classic, inscriptions at Monte Albán had shrunk to lists of dates and names, and after about AD 700 the tradition of long carved texts ends. Whether that reflects a collapse of scribal schools, a shift to painting on perishable materials, or a political decision to stop recording genealogy in stone is unknown. The later Mixtec manuscripts, painted on deer hide, may inherit some of its conventions; they are also the reason we know anything at all about the last centuries of the Zapotec kingdom.

What did the Zapotecs believe?

Zapotec religion was Mesoamerican in its structure and local in its detail. The supreme force was a creator pair, Cozaana and Huichaana, who made animals, fish and people. Below them stood a pantheon of named gods with specific jobs: Cocijo, the god of rain and lightning, whose goggle-eyed mask and split tongue appear on urns across the valley; Pitao Cozobi, the maize god; Pitao Pezeelao, lord of death and the underworld; Coquihani, god of light; Xoo, god of earthquakes; Paa, patron of merchants. The prefix pitao means "god" or "great ancestor", and the ambiguity is important: in Zapotec thought the gods and the founding dead were not always distinct.

The urns are the material expression of that religion. Made of fine grey clay, between about 20 and 60 cm tall, they consist of a cylindrical vessel with a modelled figure seated or standing in front of it, often masked, often accompanied by smaller figures and by a lid shaped like a temple or a bowl. They were placed in tombs, in niches, and under the floors of houses and platforms. Some archaeologists read the central figure as a god; others read it as the deceased, dressed as a god. The likeliest answer is that the distinction is ours, not theirs: the dead became the ancestral intercessors who carried petitions to Cocijo, and the urn was the body given to that transformation.

Burial was a household matter as much as a state one. Ordinary people were buried under house floors with a few vessels and a jade bead; elites were buried in masonry tombs with antechambers, painted walls, stone doors and a dozen urns. The tombs under the North Platform at Monte Albán are the best known: rectangular chambers with painted processions of priests and captives, some with a skull niche, some with a stair down from a courtyard. The dead stayed in the house, in other words, and the living kept feeding them.

The calendar organised the whole system. The Zapotec used a 260-day ritual count, made of twenty day names combined with thirteen numbers, and a 365-day solar year; the two meshed in a cycle of 52 years, at which point the world was, in principle, at risk of ending. Most of the Danzantes that carry glyphs are named by a day in the ritual count, and every accession, war and dedication was dated by it. To know the calendar was to know the order of the cosmos, and the people who knew it were the priests and the king.

Archaeology can say less about ritual than about belief. There are incense burners, bloodletting implements, stingray spines, shell trumpets and the remains of sacrificed animals and people. There is a ballcourt in the main plaza, with the usual Mesoamerican associations of cosmic conflict and human offering. There are also, in the later phases, images of gods who are not Zapotec: the Feathered Serpent, the Butterfly god, the rain god of Teotihuacan. A cosmopolitan pantheon is a sign of a cosmopolitan elite.

How did the Zapotec state work?

At the top sat a king, called coquitao, "great lord", whose title and image appear on stelae and tomb walls. He was a war leader, a judge, and a ritual specialist whose primary duty was to intercede with Cocijo for rain. Below him were the lords of subject towns, who paid tribute in labour, food and craft goods; below them, the priests who ran the temples and the calendar; below them, the artisans and farmers who made up the overwhelming majority of the population. The Spanish chroniclers later described the Zapotec kingdom as a federation of lordships under a paramount king at Zaachila, and there is no reason to think the Classic state was simpler.

The economy rested on intensive farming. The valley's irrigated bottomlands produced maize, beans, squash and chilli; the hillsides were terraced and cropped; maguey was grown for fibre, food and drink; and the river margins could produce two crops in a good year. Monte Albán itself sat above its fields, with a dam and canal on the south-eastern slope and a network of footpaths running down to the terraces. Feeding 35,000 people on a mountain top required an administrative machine as much as an agricultural one: storage, transport, and a system for extracting surplus from villages that could see the capital every day.

Craft production was partly attached to elite households and partly independent. Monte Albán's greyware pottery — the fine paste, the burnished surfaces, the urns — was made by specialists, and its distribution maps the state's reach. Obsidian came from the Pachuca and Otumba sources in central Mexico, shell from the Pacific coast, jade and turquoise from the south and north-west, salt from the valley's own springs and from the Isthmus. Some of these goods moved as tribute, some as gifts between lords, and some almost certainly through markets. The balance between administered exchange and market exchange is one of the long-running arguments in Mesoamerican economics, and Oaxaca is one of the places where the argument was invented.

Blanton and his colleagues described Monte Albán as a "regal-ritual city": a capital whose main product was legitimacy, whose plaza was a stage for the ceremonies that bound the valley's lords to the king, and whose economy was organised through those ceremonies rather than through a bureaucracy. Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas, working from household assemblages at the site and its hinterland, have argued for something more like a corporate state, in which power was shared among offices and factions rather than monopolised by a single dynasty. The disagreement matters because it decides whether the Zapotecs were an early state or a very large chiefdom with good architects.

What is not disputed is that the state could project force. The conquest of the Cañada de Cuicatlán, a narrow valley 80 km north of Monte Albán on the route to the Gulf lowlands, is documented by a garrisoned administrative centre at Quiotepec, by Zapotec-style pottery replacing local wares, and by the resettlement of the local population. Monte Albán also held outposts in the Ejutla and Sola de Vega valleys to the south. This was not a city-state with a hinterland of farms; it was a regional power with colonies.

What did Monte Albán's phases change, and what did Teotihuacan mean?

Caso's ceramic chronology divides the city's history into five phases, and although the absolute dates have been recalibrated repeatedly, the sequence still organises everything written about the site. The first phase, from about 500 BC to 100 BC, is the foundation: the Danzantes, the first plaza, the first defensive wall, a population of about 5,200 by 300 BC. Monte Albán II (c. 100 BC–AD 200) is the imperial phase: 17,200 inhabitants, Building J, the conquest of the Cañada, the first great tombs and the first urns. Monte Albán IIIA (c. AD 200–500) is the Classic apogee: the plaza at its final size, the North and South Platforms rebuilt, the royal tombs under the North Platform, and a population that INAH puts at about 35,000. Monte Albán IIIB (c. 500–800) is the long plateau and decline; Monte Albán IV and V (c. 800–1521) are the afterlife of a ruin, reused for burials and pilgrimage.

The relationship with Teotihuacan is the most debated item in that sequence. The two cities were contemporaries for three centuries, and the evidence of contact is unambiguous. Monte Albán has a building in Teotihuacan style, with the talud-tablero façade and the characteristic incensarios; Teotihuacan has an Oaxaca barrio, called Tlailotlacan, where Zapotec greyware, Zapotec urns and a tomb with an antechamber were found. Strontium and oxygen isotope studies of the burials there show a first generation of migrants from Oaxaca, followed by people born in Teotihuacan but raised partly in the valley — a community that kept its identity for centuries while remaining part of the metropolis.

What the contact meant is another matter. The older literature sometimes assumed Teotihuacan conquered Monte Albán, because Teotihuacan was bigger and its style is everywhere. There is no evidence for that: no destruction layer, no garrison, no interruption of the local sequence. The current view is that the two states were allies or trading partners, that Zapotec artisans worked at Teotihuacan and Teotihuacan artisans at Monte Albán, and that the flow of style was a flow of prestige in both directions. Teotihuacan's collapse in the sixth or seventh century removed the largest market and the most prestigious court in Mesoamerica, and Monte Albán's own authority began to thin not long afterwards.

The comparison with the Maya city-states is instructive. Both societies built monumental capitals, wrote with logosyllabic scripts, and used the same 260-day calendar; both collapsed in the eighth and ninth centuries. But the Maya collapse emptied cities, while the Oaxaca collapse decentralised a valley that remained densely populated. That difference is one of the reasons historians now talk about collapses in the plural.

Why did Monte Albán fall?

The building stopped first. Sometime around AD 800 the monumental programme at Monte Albán ended: no new temples, no new stelae, no new royal tombs. INAH dates the end of the city's role as capital to about 800; by 900 or 1000 the ridge was largely abandoned as a residential centre, though it was never forgotten. Burials, offerings and reoccupation of old structures continue into the Postclassic, including the famous Tomb 7, which was reopened in the fourteenth or fifteenth century to receive a Mixtec burial.

The political landscape fragmented into a dozen small kingdoms, each with its own capital and its own dynasty. Zaachila and Cuilapán controlled the Valle Grande; Lambityeco, Mitla, Yagul and El Palmillo held the Tlacolula arm; Macuilxóchitl and other towns filled the gaps. The valley's population did not collapse with the capital. If anything, the countryside absorbed the city's people, and the new centres built palaces with painted stucco friezes, carved doorjambs and their own tombs — provincial versions of the Classic style, made by lords who no longer needed a mountain.

Why it happened is a compound question. The old explanations — invasion, earthquake, epidemic — have little support. The plausible causes are the ones that appear all over Mesoamerica in the eighth and ninth centuries: a run of droughts, documented in lake and speleothem records from central Mexico and the Maya lowlands, which would have hit a city dependent on hillside terraces; soil erosion and the exhaustion of marginal land after centuries of intensive farming; the collapse of the long-distance exchange networks that supplied obsidian, shell and prestige goods; and the internal contradiction of a state in which subordinate lords grew rich enough to stop paying.

The Zapotec case is a reminder that "collapse" is a word about institutions, not about people. The Monte Albán state ended. The Zapotecs did not. Within two centuries the valley was producing some of the finest architecture in Mesoamerica at Mitla, and by the fifteenth century its lords were negotiating marriage alliances with the rulers of Tenochtitlan.

What came after: Zaachila, Mitla and the Mixtec?

Zaachila, 6 km south-west of modern Oaxaca city, became the seat of the paramount Zapotec kings in the Postclassic. The site is largely unexcavated because the modern town sits on top of it, but two tombs opened in 1962 contained Mixtec-style polychrome murals and offerings, and the town gives its name to a dynasty of kings — Zaachila I, II and III — whose dates in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries come from colonial genealogies and are not secure.

Mitla, 40 km east in the Tlacolula arm, was the religious centre. The Zapotecs called it Lyobaa, "place of rest"; the Nahuatl name Mictlan means "place of the dead", and the Spanish turned that into Mitla. INAH dates the first Zapotec settlement there to about AD 200, with the site growing in importance after Monte Albán's fall and reaching its height around AD 1200, when it may have held 15,000 people. Its five surviving building groups include two — the Adobe and Southern groups — in an earlier style close to Monte Albán's, and three later ones built around courtyards with halls and monolithic columns.

The late architecture is extraordinary for its surface. The walls are covered in mosaic fretwork, thousands of small cut stones fitted together without mortar into stepped geometric patterns, the xicalcoliuhqui or "twisted gourd" motif that became the signature of the late Zapotec style. The Hall of Columns in the Columns Group has six monolithic pillars, each carved from a single block, holding up a roof that once spanned a room 35 metres long. Under the floors are cruciform tombs with carved doorjambs, and on the walls are traces of red paint and figural murals — a wild turkey, a procession of priests.

The Mixtec presence is real and complicated. Mixtec-speaking lords from the mountains of northern Oaxaca expanded into the valley in the centuries after AD 900, and by the fifteenth century Mixtec dynasties ruled at Zaachila and elsewhere, intermarried with the Zapotec nobility, and commissioned work in a hybrid style. The old model of a Mixtec conquest that replaced a Zapotec civilisation is too simple: the Mixtec and Zapotec aristocracies merged, the Zapotec language and population remained dominant, and Mitla's architecture is Zapotec in plan and technique with Mixtec-style painting and possibly Mixtec patrons. When the Spaniards arrived, the high priest of Mitla — the Uija-tào — was one of the most powerful religious figures in southern Mexico.

How did the Zapotec kingdom end?

The Aztecs came first. Under Ahuitzotl, the Aztec Triple Alliance pushed south into the Oaxaca Valley in the 1490s, and by 1495 Zaachila was a tributary. The tribute list is revealing: nopal fruit, maguey products, firewood, salt and small amounts of cochineal — the ordinary produce of a dry highland valley, plus the one luxury dye that would become a global commodity. The Aztecs built a fort on the hill of Huaxyácac, above the site of modern Oaxaca city, to collect it.

The Zapotec king at the time, Guxi Chikoeza — Cocijoeza in the Spanish spelling — fought back. He moved his court to Guiengola, a fortified city on a ridge in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and with Mixtec allies resisted an Aztec siege that the chronicles say lasted seven months. The war ended not with a conquest but with a marriage: Ahuitzotl gave Cocijoeza a daughter, and the son of that union, Cocijopii, inherited the kingdom. The numbers in the chronicles — tens of thousands of warriors on each side — are not reliable, but the political outcome is: the Zapotec kingdom survived as a tributary of Tenochtitlan, keeping its dynasty, its gods and its language.

Then the Spaniards arrived. Hernán Cortés sent Francisco de Orozco into the valley in November 1521, weeks after the fall of Tenochtitlan, and the Zapotec and Mixtec lords submitted with relatively little fighting — a decision the chroniclers and later historians have credited with sparing Oaxaca the destruction visited on the Valley of Mexico. Cortés took the valley as his personal marquisate, and the city of Antequera, now Oaxaca de Juárez, was founded on the Zapotec settlement beside the Atoyac in 1529. The Dominicans arrived in 1528, the bishopric followed in 1535, and the Spanish Empire began the long work of converting, taxing and reorganising the valley.

The demographic catastrophe did what the armies had not. Smallpox, measles, influenza and the haemorrhagic fevers the Spaniards called cocoliztli swept through Oaxaca in repeated epidemics, and by the early seventeenth century the indigenous population of the province had fallen to a fraction of its pre-conquest level. The survivors were regrouped into parishes and congregaciones, their land reorganised around churches and Spanish estates, their nobility converted into a class of caciques who kept their titles and lost their power. Mitla's temples were quarried for the church of San Pablo, which was built directly on top of the old platform — a substitution of sacred space that the Spanish understood perfectly.

What survives?

The most obvious survival is people. About half a million Mexicans speak a Zapotec language — the 2020 census recorded roughly 500,000, of whom some 5 per cent are monolingual — spread across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the Sierra Norte, the southern mountains and the Central Valleys. Zapotec is not one language but a family of at least seven languages and dozens of varieties, part of the Oto-Manguean stock, and it is tonal: meaning depends on pitch, with up to four tones in some varieties. Migration has carried it to Mexico City, Los Angeles and the Central Valley of California, where Zapotec associations maintain festivals and radio programmes.

The material heritage is a national industry. Monte Albán was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1987, together with the historic centre of Oaxaca; INAH protects some 2,078 hectares around the site. Mitla is the state's second archaeological site after Monte Albán. The Museo Regional de Oaxaca, in the ex-convent of Santo Domingo, displays the contents of Tomb 7 — gold, turquoise, pearls and carved bone — as the centrepiece of its pre-Hispanic galleries. Tourism has remade the local economy and, in the terraced foothills around the sites, has begun to threaten it: uncontrolled building on the slopes of Monte Albán is a standing problem for the archaeologists.

The political legacy is stranger than the tourist one. Benito Juárez, the Zapotec boy from Guelatao who became president of Mexico and broke the power of the church and the army, is the most famous Oaxacan in history; the state capital added his name in 1872. Zapotec communities have been at the centre of Mexico's indigenous rights movement, and Oaxaca's traditions of communal landholding and village assembly — the usos y costumbres system — are descended, at however many removes, from the corporate political culture that Blanton and Feinman saw in the Classic state.

What has not survived is the script and the books. Not one Zapotec manuscript, not one painted genealogy, not one recorded prayer survives from before the conquest. The history in this entry was reconstructed from potsherds, house floors, skeletons, settlement patterns, carved stone and the accounts of the people who destroyed the libraries — a reminder that the Zapotec civilization was not silent, only unheard.

Common myths about the Zapotec civilization

Timeline of the Zapotec civilization

What the map shows next

At AD 200 on the map the Zapotec state is at its most expansive, with Monte Albán's conquests reaching into the Cañada de Cuicatlán and a Zapotec community already settled at Teotihuacan. Move the slider forward and the territory drawn for the capital holds steady through the Classic, then breaks into fragments after AD 800.

At AD 600 on the map the valley is still dominated by Monte Albán, but the inscriptions have stopped and the provinces are drifting; at AD 800 on the map the successor kingdoms are visible, and Mitla is beginning its rise as the religious centre of a smaller, richer, more divided Zapotec world.