Monte Albán: The City Built on a Leveled Mountain

The mountain was in the way.

When the people of the Oaxaca Valley decided to build their capital on top of a mountain, they were not choosing the most convenient location. The mountain top at what would become Monte Albán was irregular, rocky, unsuited to construction without massive preparation. The people of the valley leveled it anyway — removing the peaks, filling the depressions, building retaining walls to hold the fill in place — and what they created was a platform the size of multiple city blocks, flat, on top of a mountain, two thousand meters above sea level, commanding a view in every direction.

This took generations.

The first construction at Monte Albán begins around 500 BCE. The site reaches its peak population — perhaps 30,000 people — around the first through third centuries CE, during Monte Albán Period II-IIIA. For a thousand years it is the largest city in all of Mesoamerica west of the Gulf Coast.

Why build a city on top of a mountain?

The answer is not agricultural: the mountain top is terrible farmland. The answer is not defensive: the three valleys whose confluence the mountain overlooks could all be defended more efficiently by controlling the valley floor. The answer is visible from anywhere in the Oaxaca Valley: the city is a statement.

It says: we are at the center of everything visible from here.

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The main plaza at Monte Albán is oriented slightly off from the cardinal directions.

About eight degrees off north — which appears to be a deliberate astronomical alignment. The main axis of the plaza, running north-south, corresponds to the point on the horizon where the Pleiades rose at the moment they were most significant for the Zapotec ceremonial calendar. The building in the center of the plaza — an arrowhead-shaped structure whose unusual orientation has attracted attention since it was first described — was almost certainly an observatory, its alignment set to track specific stellar and solar events.

The entire city is an astronomical instrument.

The rulers of Monte Albán could stand in the main plaza and read the sky in several directions simultaneously, using the alignments of their buildings to mark the positions of stars and the positions of the sun at various times of year. This is the same impulse that built El Castillo at Chichén Itzá — architecture as calendar, the built environment as the instrument for reading time.

But there is also the gallery of the dead.

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The Building of the Dancers — the Danzante building on Monte Albán’s western edge — is covered in carved stone slabs that have been visible since the Spanish period. They show figures in various positions, some appearing to dance (hence the name), some appearing to be in other poses. For a long time they were interpreted as dancers in a ritual context.

They are conquered enemies.

The figures are dead or dying, their bodies in the awkward positions of violence rather than dance — limbs twisted, heads turned, some figures explicitly decapitated or with their genitals exposed in the display of humiliation that conquering armies made of their enemies. Hieroglyphic labels name some of the figures; these appear to be specific individuals, conquered rulers or warriors, their defeat recorded in stone on the wall of the capital that defeated them.

This is the same statement as the colossal heads at San Lorenzo: the ruler’s power made visible in specific stone.

Monte Albán in its founding moments is recording not mythology but history — the actual conquests that established the Zapotec state, the actual enemies whose defeat is the proof of the center’s power, the actual names of the people the Zapotec rulers killed to build the city on the mountain.

The plaza is cosmic.

The conquest is real.

The two things are the same thing, which is why the city was built on a mountain top: close enough to the sky that the cosmic claims are credible, visible enough to the valley that the political claims cannot be missed.