Palatial Digs

Natural History, March, 1999 by Charles S. Spencer

In Oaxaca, archaeologists unearth the earliest evidence yet of the first urban state in Mesoamerica.

As the summer of 1998 approached, research associate Elsa M. Redmond and I worried about our archaeological work at San Martin Tilcajete in Mexico's Oaxaca valley. For the five previous field seasons, the Museum's team had excavated during la canicula--the July-August dry spell between rainy seasons. But this year the worldwide El Nino phenomenon brought Mexico one of its driest years on record. The ground was like concrete--bad news for Zapotec farmers, who usually start planting their maize fields in late May, and bad news for us.

Archaeological research has been going on in the Oaxaca valley since the 1890s, when Marshall Saville, the Museum's first curator of Mexican and Central American archaeology, excavated at Xoxocotlan and other sites. Our Museum team now continues the work, focusing on the evolution of the urban state. Between 500 B.C. and 700 A.D., the Zapotec developed Mesoamerica's first urban culture, a state society with a centralized bureaucracy and a complex hieroglyphic writing system. The Zapotec empire extended to several surrounding valleys. Its capital was the hilltop settlement of Monte Alban, occupied in its heyday by at least thirty thousand people.

In the 1970s and 1980s, our colleagues Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, of the University of Michigan, showed that the elaborate structures at Monte Alban and smaller cities represented the key institutions of the Zapotec state and that they were built between 100 B.C. and 200 A.D. The palaces of the ruling elite, probably constructed with communal labor, had several rooms arranged around interior patios. Multiroom temples were staffed by priests who performed sacrifices and other religious rituals.

Flannery and Marcus also established that these kinds of buildings did not exist before 500 B.C., but by the early 1990s, archaeologists still had not pinpointed when these constructions first appeared. Finding the answer would be important for Mexican archaeology and for general anthropological research relating to the rise of states.

Hoping to shed some light on the matter, we had been concentrating on the prehistoric urban center of San Martin Tilcajete, devoting our first two field seasons (1993 and 1994) to an overall survey of the 220-acre site. During the 1995, 1996, and 1997 seasons, we dug in the site's eastern section, exposing a one-room temple and a high-status residence that we dated to between 500 and 250 B.C. These, however, were not the elaborate buildings of the urban state. In August 1997 we focused our attention on the site's western sector, known locally as El Palenque, where our initial survey had turned up many ceramic artifacts dating to between 250 and 100 B.C. We excavated part of a very large residence that we thought might qualify as a true palace, and we suspected that a nearby elongated mound might contain a multiroom temple. But the field season was at an end, so after covering the remains with plastic sheets and falling the pits with dirt, we reluctantly headed back to New York.

In 1998 the rains finally came at the end of June. In mid-July our team assembled at El Palenque. Four of us from the Museum (Redmond and I, plus Luca Casparis and Andrew Balkansky) were joined by three graduate students from the University of Michigan and twenty men from the present-day town of San Martin Tilcajete. In the course of the next few weeks, we came up with extraordinary finds. The large residence we had discovered at the end of the previous season turned out to cover 2,755 square feet and to have eight rooms surrounding an interior patio. It was in an excellent state of preservation, with ceramic vessels and other artifacts still in place--even parts of adobe brick walls remained on stone foundations. Dated to between 250 and 100 B.C., the palace was the earliest discovered in Oaxaca thus far. Our excavation of the long mound proved equally momentous: we exposed a well-preserved temple consisting of two long rectangular rooms (measuring forty-two by eight feet and thirty-two by seven feet), with a smaller room at each end.

We can now report that both the palace and the multiroom temple definitely made their appearance in Oaxaca between 250 and 100 B.C.--more than a century earlier than had been previously known. Excited by these discoveries, we are now counting the weeks to the next field season and the promise of uncovering more finds that will shed light on the ancient Zapotec state.

Charles S. Spencer is the curator of Mexican and Central American archaeology in the Museum's Department of Anthropology. He has recently published, with Elsa M. Redmond, Archaeology of the Canada de Cuicatlan, Oaxaca, a monograph in the Museum's Anthropological Papers series.