© Copyright 1998 by Tony Burton. All rights reserved.
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(Part 1: The America's Oldest Urban Center)
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Having reached Monte Alban and entered the site, on your right as you stand at the corner of the main plaza is the North Platform, the site of the Zapotec king's residence and the temples of the nobility. Wandering around the hillside behind the North Platform, you will discover various sunken courtyards, some with vaulted tombs below. Distinguishing between residences and temples is relatively easy - the former have narrow entrances, the latter have much wider doorways.
To your left, on the eastern side of the plaza, are the distinctively-shaped ballcourt (shaped like a capital I) and The Palace, presumed home of an important dignitary. Most of the constructions you can see were built and then rebuilt several times. Also on your left, but further away, at a distance of about 300 meters, are the temples of the South Platform. Standing on the windswept South Platform, admiring the view below, leads one to ponder on the improbability of this site from the point of view of water or food supplies. Military superiority (in terms of height) it may have enjoyed, but from where did all the water and food needed to sustain this sizeable city come?
Archaeologists have worked out that the Zapotec not only engineered numerous water storages, but reorganized them as needed. Most cultivation (corn, beans, squash, chiles) took place on the valley floor; some fields were irrigated. It has been calculated that about 17,500 people could have been supported by the annual production of crops within an eight kilometer radius of Monte Alban. At its peak, the city housed twice as many - 35,000 inhabitants.
On the far side of the main plaza from the entrance, two temples, each with decorative panels, flank the Building of the Dancers. The large bas-reliefs depicting human figures in various contorted poses which can be seen in this building are one of the two particular features found in this grand plaza which deserve special mention. These strange figures were christened "danzantes" (dancers) long ago and the name has stuck, despite a total lack of evidence that they really portray performing artists.
Fifteen years ago, a local guide spent most of his two-hour personal tour trying to convince me that these bas-reliefs, of undeniably Olmec style, really represented hospital cases - they were portraits of sick people and functioned as a kind of combined medical textbook and hospital out-patients' list. In his view, Monte Alban had been the Americas' original General Hospital, a place of healing somewhat akin to Houston Medical Centre today! Other guides have claimed these sculpted stones show priests in various stages of ecstasy. But there is ample evidence to the contrary and the truth is almost certainly much more prosaic.
In a Scientific American article (February 1980), Joyce Marcus presents a compelling case for considering the earliest of the 300-plus "danzantes" as pictorial messages forming an overall display, like a mural, showing captives and lists of conquered places. While the overall display must have been striking, and possibly served as propaganda, each individual monument conveyed relatively little information. On later monuments, numerous varied glyphs incorporated into the inscriptions allowed far more detailed information to be conveyed. According to Marcus, later themes included genealogical registers, diplomacy and the peaceful connection between Monte Alban and Teotihuacan. Marcus also believes that it will not be long before scholars will understand many of the details of the Zapotec hieroglyphic writing system, the oldest known in the New World, dating as far back as 600 B.C. Just as this writing system predates both Aztec and Maya writing systems, so Zapotec calendric inscriptions also predate Maya calendar glyphs, though the two systems share the same conventions for how numbers are portrayed.
Besides the long-standing debate over the precise meaning of the "danzantes," the great court houses another mystery - the purpose of the enigmatic, uniquely arrow-shaped Structure J, positioned close to the South Platform. Of all the structures found at Monte Alban, this is the most puzzling. A brilliant, but unsubstantiated, early guess by famed Mexican archaeologist Alfonso Caso in the 1930s that it was an astronomical observatory has gained considerable strength in recent years as a result of the pioneering work of archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni.
Aveni has shown how the building's front doorway is precisely aligned with the point where the bright star Capella (the sixth brightest in the sky) would have first appeared in the dawn sky each year, on precisely the same day that the sun reached its first of two annual zenith days over Monte Alban, on each of which it casts no shadow at mid-day. The front stairway of J is aligned in turn with Structure P (on the eastern side of the plaza), which has a unique vertical shaft leading down into a chamber down which the sun would have shone with no shadow on that same day. Crossed-stick symbols found on Structure J lend further support to the importance of astronomical sighting-stick observations from this position. Moreover, the asymmetric plan of Structure J turns out to be precisely aligned with the point to the west where 5 of the 25 brightest stars in the sky, including the Southern Cross, first rise above the horizon. Proof positive, this isn't, but suggestive, it certainly is.
The invisible mystery of Monte Alban is...
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