Zapotec Civilization
by
Joyce Marcus; Kent V. Flannery
ISBN: 0500050783
Publication Date: 1996-04-01
Zapotec Civilization describes the work of Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus, and their colleagues over more than two decades in Mexico's Oaxaca Valley. Here the Zapotecs created one of the world's autochthonous civilizations, to set beside that of the Aztecs and the Maya in its achievements. At its peak 1,500 years ago, the Zapotec capital of Monte Alban - with its magnificent temples, tombs, ball-courts, and hieroglyphic inscriptions - dominated a society of over 100,000 people, with farflung territorial outposts. Yet a millennium earlier Monte Alban had been uninhabited, and the valley's population less than one tenth its later size. What caused this cultural florescence? Marcus and Flannery go back to the very beginnings of settlement in Oaxaca, 10,000 years ago, to provide the answers. They explicitly set out to discover whether the contesting claims of evolutionary anthropologists stand up to the hard evidence in the field. .