After Monte Albán: Transformation and Negotiation in Oaxaca, Mexico

Foreword

vii After Monte Albán: Transformation and Negotiation in Oaxaca, Mexico provides a welcome addition to the series Mesoamerican Worlds: From the Olmecs to the Danzantes. Indeed, After Monte Albán is a fresh contribution that extends somewhat the boundaries implied by the series’ subtitle. The so-called Danzantes, famed carvings of human figures in an array of contorted poses, belong to the earliest era of the great Zapotec capital Monte Albán, which emerged sometime around 500 BCE. Objects of endless debate, these highly distinctive carvings—dozens of which were found either in their original positions on the façade of Building L, one of the oldest structures at the site, or scattered elsewhere around the ruined city—were at one point thought to depict individuals engaged in ritual dances. Following a raft of alternate interpretations, the prevailing, though by no means unanimous, opinion at present is, however, that the weirdly twisted Danzante figures represent slain and mutilated captives of those that ruled Monte Albán during the city’s initial surge toward greatness. The intensity and longevity of debate surrounding these Danzante figures, which were unearthed and sketched by Guillermo Dupaix in 1806 and so-named by Leopold Batres during his work at the site from 1901 to 1902, instantiate the Lindsay Jones Foreword Jeffrey P. Blomster viii Foreword disproportionate attention that has been paid to the early stages in the development of the Zapotec capital. The Aztec and Maya regions have attracted more scrutiny, but this early period of Oaxacan history, along with the circumstances that led to theemergenceandascentofMonteAlbánasthedominantcapitalcityintheregion, have received an abundance of serious and sustained academic attention since the pathbreaking work of Alfonso Caso in the 1930s. The circumstances connected with Monte Albán’s decline and the Oaxaca region in the wake of the great capital’s demise—that is to say, the era and circumstances on which this book focuses—have, by contrast, been object of far less scholarly investigation and interpretation. After Monte Albán, by focusing attention on the “critical junction” between the Late Classic and Postclassic eras in Oaxaca, goes a long way in rectifying that imbalance . Of interest to Oaxacan specialists and more general readers, this volume contains both abundant attention to detail concerning recent excavations and revised chronologies as well as more broadly sweeping arguments concerning the distinctive , if more decentralized, pattern of authority that characterized Oaxaca following Monte Albán’s decline. Solidly grounded in state-of-the-art archaeology, several chapters capitalize also on the greater abundance of extant codices and ethnohistorical resources for this later period. Attentive to new research on the much-studied central valley and Mixteca regions, the collection addresses as well Postclassic developments in several other regions of Oaxaca and even neighboring eastern Guerrero that are highly relevant but seldom discussed. Moreover, these essays engage both the local dynamics and responses to the collapse of Monte Albán as well as investigating Oaxaca’s participation in pan-Mesoamerican Postclassic political, economic, and social changes, a strategy that helps to explain important linkages between the respective demises of Monte Albán, Teotihuacan, and several of the great Classic Maya cities. And, as a consequence of the interplay between those tight and wideangled views of the aftermath of Monte Albán, the volume brings to the fore not only ways in which Postclassic Oaxacan society was more similar to its contemporaneous counterparts in Central Mexico and the Maya zone than we would have imagined but also ways in which Oaxaca’s approach to polity and trade was unique and decidedly different from that which was obtained in those more fully studied regions. Additionally, by appreciating this late period in Oaxaca not simply as a degenerate version of the preceding era but instead as a time of distinctive creativity—in fact, a kind of florescence in its own right—this collection brings new subtlety to the old question of continuities and changes between the Classic and Postclassic eras. We are apprised, on the one hand, that even in the wake of the collapse of Monte Albán, the quotidian lives of ancient Oaxaca’s lower classes proceeded much as they had before. To a remarkable extent, Postclassic means of subsistence and food production, house construction and domestic technologies, “core beliefs” and Preface ix ritual practices, particularly those associated with burial and the treatment of the non-elite dead, were virtually indistinguishable from...