ABSTRACT
Some 2,500 years ago when Greeks were busy fighting Persians at places like Thermopylae and Marathon, Zapotec Indians across the Atlantic began building a great city, possibly the first in the New World. The job called for reshaping Monte Albán, a 1,500-foot hill overlooking the Valley of Oaxaca in central Mexico. Cutting into the hillsides, workers constructed hundreds of terraces, stepped platforms with retaining walls designed mainly for plain and fancy residences. For the seats of the mighty, the palaces and temples and major administrative centers, they leveled the entire hilltop, creating the main plaza on a 55-acre super-terrace perhaps eight times bigger than St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
Monte Albán endured for more than a millennium. It housed 20,000 to 30,000 persons at its height, and lost its position as a regional capital some seven to eight centuries before the arrival of invaders from imperial Spain.
John E. Pfeiffer, “The mysterious rise and decline of Monte Albán,” Smithsonian, February, 1980.
