monte alban

we went out to monte alban on sunday, a site i´ve been waiting to visit now for quite some time and it did not dissapoint. situated on top of a massive hill right in the center of the valley of oaxaca the massive main plaza offers stunning views of the entire valley and it quickly became apparent why the zapotecs stationed thier capital there. i´ve talked a little about zapotec imperialism and civilization before and while monte alban is certainly a stunning tribute to both it was another attribute entirely that struck me about the ruins of this ancient city. the main plaza, the center of the site and the location of the most tourist activity, was largely designed as a place for the performance of public religious rites and rituals. as monte alban grew nobles there had to find increasingly more complex and spectacular ways to legitimize their power and the architecture at monte alban is largely a tribute to this continuing struggle for political supremacy. generally the buildings become larger and grander over time as one would expect, but they also came complete with a series of architectural developments which would have only added to the drama and spectacle of public rituals and the legitimization of power. hidden tunnels were built connecting many of the buildings which would have allowed priests to miraculously appear at a completely seperate part of the site, surely an amazing sight to spiritually charged spectators in the crowd below. hidden chambers were built to emit smoke holes built in the pyramid walls, and carved figures depicting captives and ancestors were erected on the walls of the buildings to remind the people of monte alban of their history, heritage, and debt owed to the gods and ancestors for thier current success. however, the real development came not in grand pyramids or underground tunnels but instead from a complicated limiting of space. by limiting access to religious sites within the larger city, elites were able to display their own power and prestige to anyone watching, a sort of private club which everyone could see but only a few could take part in.
this dramatic limiting of space is most apparent in the north platform of the site, the last major architectural feature to be built there. it is a continuing series of pyramids that grows higher and higher as you go up though remarkably you can´t see this from the main plaza. you go up one level and think you are as high as you can go only to find another higher temple complex, and then another, and another still. anyone standing on the main plaza would not have been aware that this much architecture existed and admittance to the north platform would have suddenly afronted the viewer with a mass of tremendous religious architecture that would have appeared to have come from nowhere, each pyramid blocking the view of the higher one behind it. even to the modern viewer this illusion is true. as i climbed up the north platform i would continually believe that i had reached the highest point of the site, turn and take panoramic photos of the plaza below and the valley of oaxaca. upon turning back however i would only find another group of temple pyramids to climb. this sort of hidden architecture with highly controlled access (sort of the vip lounge of the ancient world) gave elites who routinely frequented the north platform an extreme amount of prestige in zapotec society. to maintain this power and prestige some elites were even able to build their palaces and tombs right next to the north platform to form an elite neighborhood closest to the best architecture in the city (professor blomster jokingly calls it the zapotec dupont circle).
perhaps the most stunning thing about monte alban however is its sheer size. at its height around 500 AD over 30,000 people lived there, spread out on terraces built over the contours of three huge hills. at the time few european cites rivaled monte alban´s size, architecture, and population. we, as westerners and particularly as americans, are often led to think of the new world as a vast span of open land only moderately populated by roving bands of indigenous peoples, but in reality, as monte alban attests, cities in the new world prior to european contact were often just as populated and developed as those of the old world, if not more so in some cases. i´ll talk more about this when i talk about the spanish conquest in another couple of days, but as i was climbing the ruins of monte alban i was struck by how incredible this city was and still is, and how little its place is in the story of our prehistory. surely such a massive and important place deserves greater attention and part of the aims of this summer are to draw more attention to the wonderful and fascinating civilizations that inhabited the new world long before the arrival of europeans.