The Main Plaza of Monte Albán

Monte Albán was founded about 500 BC on a series of mountains in the center of the Oaxaca Valley (Caso et al. Reference Caso, Bernal and Acosta1967; Joyce Reference Joyce2010; Marcus and Flannery Reference Marcus and Flannery1996). During its first several centuries, Monte Albán became the region’s first urban center and remained so until about AD 800 when ruling institutions collapsed and people left the city. One of the earliest human activities at Monte Albán was the construction of the Main Plaza precinct on the site’s highest summit (Figure 2), which was continuously modified by people until the city was depopulated.

Figure 2. View of the Main Plaza of Monte Albán from the valley floor below (photo by author). (Color online)

Excavation shows that platforms on the plaza consisted of rubble fill along with finer fills probably deposited with baskets (Winter Reference Winter1989:42–43). Both retaining and standing walls were built of stone masonry and adobe joined with mud mortar. The stone used in walls and fill included limestone and sandstone quarried from the site itself; limestone was also used to make plaster for floors and for coating the walls of buildings and tombs. The scale of architecture on the plaza during its first century or two meant that its construction required far more labor than did earlier public buildings in the Oaxaca Valley.

The art and architecture built on the Main Plaza during its first 500 years enhanced the semiotic density and intensity of expression of the mountaintop relative to the time before the arrival of humans. The Main Plaza became a focus of practices, imagery, and writing related to various forms of sacrifice, including earth offerings that animated buildings, as well as human and auto-sacrifice (Joyce Reference Joyce, Kosiba, Janusek and Cummins2020a; Urcid Reference Urcid and Nelly2011; Urcid and Joyce Reference Urcid, Joyce, Tsukamoto and Inomata2014). A semasiographic program set into the facades of Building L-sub in the southwestern corner of the plaza consisted of more than 300 carved orthostats that depict men performing genital auto-sacrifice to invoke ancestors (Figure 3). The cornerstones of Building L-sub included hieroglyphic texts referring to rulers, their enthronements, and the defeat and sacrifice of enemies. A second semasiographic program consisted of at least 68 incised slabs whose original location is unknown but that were later reset in Building J (Figures 4a and 4b). Recent analyses show that the slabs refer to only a single place, probably Monte Albán, and likely depict revered ancestors (Urcid and Joyce Reference Urcid, Joyce, Tsukamoto and Inomata2014). A cornerstone displays a ruler who is shown performing auto-sacrifice and human sacrifice while manifesting the rain deity.

Figure 3. Carved orthostats from Building L-sub depicting men performing genital auto-sacrifice to invoke ancestors (photo by author; from Joyce and Barber Reference Joyce and Barber2015:Figure A3). (Color online)

Figure 4. Monumental art from the Main Plaza: (a) revered ancestor (drawing by Elbis Domínguez Covarrubias; from Joyce Reference Joyce, Michael and Guernsey2022:Figure 2.3E; reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear); (b) ruler performing auto-sacrifice and human sacrifice while manifesting the rain deity (drawing by Javier Urcid; from Joyce Reference Joyce, Michael and Guernsey2022:Figure 2.3F; reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear used with permission); (c) North Platform frieze (drawing and reconstruction courtesy of Javier Urcid and Elbis Domínguez Covarrubias, from Joyce Reference Joyce, Michael and Guernsey2022:Figure 2.4; reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear).

The emphasis on various forms of sacrifice in the architecture, imagery, and writing on the Main Plaza indicates that the cosmic creation was alluded to as early as the first few centuries of the city’s occupation, and evidence shows that the plaza continued to be a place of creation long after it fell to ruin (Pohl Reference Pohl and Boone2005). In Mesoamerican cosmogonies—elements of which first appear between 1000 and 300 BC (Grove Reference Grove, Grove and Joyce1999; Joyce Reference Joyce, Dobres and Robb2000)—sacrifice was fundamental to the creation of the current world and the origins of agriculture, as well as to ongoing relations between people, deities, and ancestors (López Austin Reference López Austin1988; Monaghan Reference Monaghan1990). Although cosmogonies vary somewhat across Mesoamerica, they depict the creation as the outcome of conflict and negotiation between original ancestors and deities. The result was a sacred covenant in which people petitioned deities for agricultural fertility and prosperity in return for sacrificial offerings.

Mesoamerican creation narratives and their implications for life therefore were an extension of agriculture because they involved the mediation through sacrifice of the risk and uncertainty associated with human dependence on maize (Joyce Reference Joyce2020b). The flows of matter and energy among rain, earth, sun, maize, and people that are visible in agriculture also came to signify an invisible world of vitality consisting of life forces that animated all living beings. This vitality defined what it was to be sacred and animated a great diversity of things, including monumental buildings and mountains. Sacrifice therefore can be seen as a kind of agricultural ritual that invoked the sacred covenant and the cosmic creation, intervening in flows of vitality among maize, rain, earth, buildings, divinities, and people. I refer to this entanglement of farming and agricultural rituals as an agricultural assemblage.

The Main Plaza, and Monte Albán more generally, also assembled another element of Mesoamerican cosmogeny: the mountain of creation and sustenance (López Austin and López Luján Reference López Austin and Luján2009). These sacred mountains were liminal places where sky, earth, the underworld, and ancestors merged; they were also sources of rain and agricultural fertility where sacrifices were performed. Even before its founding, Monte Albán assembled many of the phenomena that constituted the mountain of creation and sustenance (Joyce Reference Joyce2020b). At nearly 400 m above the valley floor, Monte Albán projects far into the sky and during the rainy season is often enveloped in rain, clouds, wind, and mist, with water also emerging from the earth in the form of springs. The stone quarried from the mountain for construction of the city indexically merged the mountain with art and architecture. In addition to the representations of sacrifice and ancestors in semasiographic programs in the southern end of the plaza, a frieze in the North Platform included graphic references to aquatic themes, such as shells, bands of flowing water, rain, and probably the rain deity (Figure 4c). The layout of art and architecture around the plaza therefore created a cosmogram with references to sky, rain, and clouds to the north and ancestors, sacrifice, and the underworld to the south (Joyce Reference Joyce, Dobres and Robb2000). Deities represented on monuments and ceramic effigy vessels included the rain deity and possibly the maize deity. A stone-lined cistern near the center of the plaza captured rainwater from nearby buildings that was conveyed to the cistern by tunnels, thereby reinforcing the association between the mountaintop, earth, rain, and water. Thus, sacrificial ceremonies, which were cosmogenic, were performed in a setting that invoked the cosmos and assembled fundamental components of the mountain of creation and sustenance.

Although people built the plaza and performed ceremonies within it, the Main Plaza could not have come together without earth, sky, rain, stone, deities, ancestors, and sacrifices, along with the relations among these things that activated emergent properties, making the plaza assemblage more than the sum of its parts. Monte Albán increasingly reached out to the valley below as people were drawn to the plaza for ceremony, commerce, and community. All these attractions involved intensive relations among people and things, such as access to (1) powerful deities and ancestors through ceremony, (2) a greater variety of goods through specialization and markets, and (3) a greater diversity of people, customs, and ideas moving into and out of the emerging urban center. The community that came together at Monte Albán was therefore more than a human assemblage.

The Acropolis of Río Viejo

Río Viejo located on the floodplain of the lower Río Verde Valley is the earliest known urban center on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. The city covered approximately 225 ha during the Terminal Formative period (100 BC–AD 250), and by AD 150 its ceremonial core was located on the site’s massive acropolis (Figure 5). The acropolis lacked the semiotic density of the art and writing found at Monte Albán, especially the connection to the mountain of creation and sustenance. Instead, its affective intensity and semiotic associations within a broader agricultural assemblage including earth, water, sky, maize, and people are seen in the materials gathered in the building (Joyce et al. Reference Joyce, Frederick, Barber and Daneels2021). The ceremonial center consisted of a platform rising at least 7 m above the floodplain and supporting two large substructural platforms (Structures 1 and 2), both of which stood at least 17 m high. Structure 2 consisted of a large, stepped platform with retaining walls made of broken adobe and fired brick fragments held together with mud mortar. This platform supported an elaborate adobe and wattle-and-daub building, probably a temple, that included cream-colored architectural stucco and painted adobes. Excavations in much of the remaining areas of the acropolis exposed numerous substructural platforms measuring 1–2 m in height and built of stone or adobe, some with wattle-and-daub superstructures, along with a possible sunken plaza.

Figure 5. Plan of the acropolis of Río Viejo showing areas excavated (drafted by the author and Stacy Barber; used with permission).

Diverse and labor-intensive earthen construction techniques—including three types of sheet fill, two types of adobe fill, and rammed earth, along with adobe and stone walls—were used in the acropolis (Figure 6). Many of these techniques required a variety of materials and a complex sequence of steps that in some cases involved the use of wooden frames or small cells (Joyce et al. Reference Joyce, Frederick, Barber and Daneels2021). The diversity of techniques suggests that, although there must have been some overall organization of building activities, people from different communities and perhaps from different neighborhoods within Río Viejo brought with them their diverse architectural techniques and equipment. At times multiple work crews using different adobe recipes may have participated in the construction of a single wall. In other instances, we found construction sequences where fill types varied through time, suggesting the possibility that different work crews shifted in and out of construction activities.

Figure 6. Types of earthen fill on the acropolis: (a) sheet fills; (b) adobe fills; (c) rammed earth (photos by author and Stacy Barber; used with permission). (Color online)

Building the acropolis drew on skills developed over centuries of work with different kinds of earth through house construction, potting, and farming. Additional knowledge was gained as these materials revealed their capacities and limitations when assembled in the novel setting of the construction of monumental architecture. Seasonal routines of work, investment, and collaboration entangled people and materials, forming memories and attachments anchored to these buildings. New materialist theory allows us to see the acropolis as a gathering of community that did not just involve people but also sand, silt, and clay from the floodplain; granite from nearby hills; water to mix with sediment; the sun to dry adobes; grass fiber for temper; shell and fire to create binding agents; tools to acquire and shape these materials; and many other items. Relations among these things were mutually affective in that they actualized capacities involving the acquisition, shaping, hardening, drying, binding, and assembling of materials through which the acropolis emerged. As buildings rose through this gathering, the acropolis was differentiated as a place of intensive affect distinguished from the surrounding landscape.

The raising of the acropolis and the materials and memories that it gathered therefore indexed important elements of agricultural assemblages like earth, rain, sun, and the Río Verde’s floodplain, which was the focus of farming for the people of the valley. Imagery on ceramics and portable art at this time also references important elements of agriculture as manifested by the sacred covenant, including maize, rain, clouds, wind, lightning, the rain deity, death, and sacrifice (Brzezinski Reference Brzezinski2011). Evidence for ceremonies on the acropolis includes large feasting middens and an earth oven. In feasting, people shared in the sustenance provided by the divine in return for acts of sacrifice. Several ceramic vessels along with two sets of partial human remains may have been modest offerings, along with three articulated burials. Although we have yet to recover evidence for other rituals on the acropolis during the century after its completion, the possible plaza along with platforms of different sizes would have provided a variety of degrees of accessibility and visibility for ceremonial performances.

Another component of agriculture in the region that differed from those in the Oaxaca Valley were the seasonal floodwaters of the Verde. The Verde is the second-largest river on the Pacific coast of Mexico and is far larger than drainages in the highlands (Mueller et al. Reference Mueller, Joyce, Borejsza, Goman and Joyce2013). During the rainy season, the river floods over much of its floodplain, providing water and fertile alluvium to farm fields, although large floods and channel shifts can destroy crops. Thus, the river and its flows of water and sediment were important components of the agricultural assemblage in the lowlands. There are strong indications that both the placement of the acropolis and its construction assembled aspects of the fluvial environment. The acropolis was built immediately east of a relict channel of the Verde, through which floodwaters still flow during the rainy season (Figure 7). In addition, most of the base of the acropolis directly abuts the floodplain, and because the building is only about 1 km west of the main channel of the river, water likely surrounded much of the acropolis during large floods.

Figure 7. Rainy season floodwaters flowing through the relict channel adjacent to the acropolis (photo by author). (Color online)

The Monuments in Ruin

The Río Viejo acropolis and the Main Plaza at Monte Albán had very different histories (Joyce Reference Joyce2010). The Main Plaza continued as a politico-religious center until the Monte Albán polity collapsed and the site was largely abandoned at AD 800. The acropolis was not as long-lived. After perhaps a century of use, the acropolis was abandoned at AD 250 concurrent with a regional political collapse and a loss of more than half of Río Viejo’s population. Sociopolitical hierarchies in both regions declined considerably after their respective collapses. Processes of ruination immediately affected both monuments.

Even after people abandoned Monte Albán, however, many of the components of the mountain of creation and sustenance endured as they had prior to human involvement. Although the decaying buildings of the Main Plaza and throughout the city indexed the rupture that caused the collapse of rulership and the depopulation of the city (Figure 8), the mountain itself endured. The Main Plaza continued to assemble rain, earth, sky, and clouds along with ancestors, deities, offerings, animate buildings in ruin, and material memories of rituals and rulership. The stone masonry architecture of the plaza was relatively resistant to ruination in the semiarid Oaxaca Valley.

Figure 8. Photo of the ruins of the Main Plaza taken by C. B. Waite circa 1900 (courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum).

Given that people no longer occupied the site, the gradual collapse of walls and the overgrowth of vegetation would not have routinely been observed. Because the mountain on which the plaza was built was a major component of this place of creation and sustenance, it would have persisted as such, despite the decay of buildings and the lack of permanent human residents. Its durability and high visibility over much of the valley continued to draw together people through practice and affiliation, if only from a distance.

Evidence for such a gathering comes from offerings left in the Main Plaza in the centuries after its abandonment (Herrera Muzgo Reference Herrera Muzgo Torres, de la Cruz and Winter2002). Postclassic (AD 800–1522) earth offerings have been found in and around the plaza placed in ruined Temple-Patio-Adoratorio complexes (TPAs) and in several reused tombs. TPAs consist of a temple elevated on a platform that faces an enclosed or sunken patio with an ancestor memorial in the center (see Figure 1). Offerings were made over several centuries, with some TPAs accumulating more than 2,000 objects. The offerings consisted of modest items, such as incense burners, miniature vessels, obsidian blades, and penates (small anthropomorphic stone figures depicting dead people).

Similar offerings were placed in tombs associated with Classic period residences near the Main Plaza. Like sunken or enclosed courts throughout Mesoamerica, the material properties of TPAs and tombs afforded iconic sign relations with caves, which were associated with sacred mountains and with the origins of rain, rain deities, and fertility (Parsons Reference Parsons1936). Offerings in caves include objects similar to those in the TPAs and tombs and today are used to contact ancestors, to petition deities, and to bring harm to enemies (Barabas et al. Reference Barabas, Winter, del Carmen Castillo and Moreno2005). The TPAs and tomb offerings indicate that people, perhaps from multiple communities in the valley, continued to be drawn back to the rain-earth-sky-cloud assemblage of the mountain to make sacrifices to deities and ancestors. Even in ruin, the plaza had the power to create more-than-human communities and affiliations that reached beyond Monte Albán. This power continued into the Late Postclassic (AD 1200–1522) when tombs at Monte Albán were reused to inter prominent nobles and the Main Plaza was depicted as a place of creation at Mitla (Pohl Reference Pohl and Boone2005).

The materiality of the Río Viejo acropolis was not as resistant to the forces of decay as the Main Plaza (Joyce et al. Reference Joyce, Levine, King, Balkin and Barber2014, Reference Joyce, Frederick, Barber and Daneels2021). During its abandonment around AD 250, termination rituals that released the vitality of the building were performed; they included the burning of buildings, followed by the capping of parts of the acropolis by thin fill layers, some of which contained high densities of broken pottery. In several areas, pits were then dug into these fill layers into which sherds and whole or partial vessels were placed. We have not been able to determine whether this was a reverential or desecratory termination or whether the latter even occurred in coastal Oaxaca.

As the acropolis was ritually terminated, building maintenance was suspended, and erosion channels began to cut through the earthen architecture during intense storms in the rainy season. The temple on Structure 2 collapsed and its adobe walls disintegrated. In the area west of Structure 2, excavations identified numerous erosion channels and erosion deposits. Over the next 250 years there is relatively little evidence for human involvement in the acropolis. The acropolis was not stagnant, however: erosion and decay continued to transform the building. Unlike the Main Plaza, the acropolis was in the center of Río Viejo, and its decay would have been experienced on a daily basis by residents. The ritual closure, abandonment, and decay of the acropolis, as well as people leaving the city, would have indexed the rupture of the more-than-human community that came together to build and carry out rituals on the acropolis.

During the Late Classic period (AD 500–800), people and things were drawn back to the acropolis as Río Viejo reemerged as a city with powerful rulers whose images were inscribed in dozens of stone monuments (Joyce Reference Joyce2010). Although significant labor was expended in repairing eroded areas of the acropolis, it was not a site of frequent, large-scale ceremonies, and the architecture was not rebuilt (Joyce et al. Reference Joyce, Levine, King, Balkin and Barber2014). Instead, the new assemblage that emerged with the acropolis involved the past that had endured in ruin. The initial act during the Late Classic was placement of a massive offering directly on the ruined surface at the center of the acropolis. The offering included three large ceramic vessels containing human bodies surrounded by other articulated bodies and ceramic vessels, as well as a bed of burned and cut human and animal bone (Figure 9). The offering was then covered with fill on which two plain stelae were placed. Given that termination rituals were carried out when the acropolis was abandoned around AD 250, Joyce and colleagues (Reference Joyce, Levine, King, Balkin and Barber2014) interpret the Late Classic feature as an elaborate earth offering designed to reanimate it. Furthermore, the cut and burned bone likely indexed human and animal sacrifice, whereas the articulated burials may have indexed sacrifice or ancestors. The offering was undoubtedly an intensive event enhancing, once again, the power of the building. The offering and the repair of areas most affected by erosion may have been designed to heal the acropolis (Navarro Farr et al. Reference Navarro Farr, Freidel, Prera, Travis and Magnoni2008).

Figure 9. Photo of part of the Late Classic offering in the acropolis showing a large ceramic vessel containing a human body, as well as several smaller vessels and a plain stela (photo by author). (Color online)

At some time after the burial of the offering, areas to the north and south were the focus of possible dedicatory activities. To the north, three carved stone monuments and several uncarved ones were erected (Joyce et al. Reference Joyce, Levine, King, Balkin and Barber2014). Two of the monuments depict rulers of Río Viejo; the third depicts only the calendrical name of a ruler. South of the complex offering, excavations exposed 23 human burials, each accompanied by few or no offerings, along with a modest wattle-and-daub structure; no other Late Classic structures were discovered on the acropolis.

Despite having eroded and decayed for more than two centuries, the acropolis retained its power to gather people and things. The evidence raises the question of why people would repair and reanimate this building but not reoccupy it. We cannot be sure at this point, but the evidence of ritual offerings and the burials, as well as carved stones referencing ancestors, raises the issue of the heterotemporality of ruins and how they persist and can invoke the past and affect people (Dawdy Reference Dawdy2016; Gordillo Reference Gordillo2014). During the Terminal Formative period, the people of Río Viejo collaborated with many materials to construct this immense monument. Although the symbolic significance of the acropolis is not as accessible as that of the Main Plaza, its construction brought together many of the things that constituted an agricultural assemblage in the region. Including earth, water, sun, river, floodplain, people, and perhaps many of the same tools used in farming, the ritual feasts carried out after its completion indexed fertility and abundance.

The closing of the acropolis, the onset of its decay, and the emigration of people from Río Viejo can be seen in Deluezean terms as a deterritorialization of assemblages through which the city and its ruling hierarchy had been constituted (Figure 10). Yet memories of this rupture persisted, indexically signified by termination deposits and erosion channels and amplified through time as the people of Río Viejo dwelled amidst the decaying ruins. As Olsen (Reference Olsen2010:169) argues, ruins and decaying things can become agents of disruption by actualizing memories, including alternative pasts that can include things forgotten and unwanted (also see Dawdy Reference Dawdy2016; Gordillo Reference Gordillo2014). Ruins can bring to mind the fact that aspects of the world that seem stable and taken for granted are actually unstable, disruptive, or threatening. The reemergence of Río Viejo and its rulers may have actualized those memories of rupture held in materially motivated signs that had endured. The monumentality of the acropolis in its ruined state may have posed a threat to nobles attempting to reestablish political hierarchy. By repairing, healing, and reanimating the acropolis and by enacting rituals to commemorate its past, Late Classic rulers may have attempted to assert control over a thing that by its very presence questioned the inevitability and legitimacy of their power. Even in ruin, the acropolis held the power to resist human projects and new, more hierarchical forms of community. The attempt of rulers to appropriate the power of the acropolis was not successful in the long term, however. By around AD 800, ruling institutions had once again collapsed.

Figure 10. The Río Viejo acropolis in ruin (photo by author). (Color online)