Monte Albán’s hilltop capital watched three Oaxaca valleys
Zapotec civilization (c. 700 BC–AD 1521) rose in Oaxaca’s Y-shaped Central Valleys. In the late sixth century BC a new mountain settlement—Monte Albán—filled the no-man’s-land overlooking three rival valley societies and became an expanding state.
Expansion surged in late Monte Albán I (400–100 BC) and phase II (100 BC–AD 200), planting colonies and influence far outside the valley, visible in sudden ceramic and architectural shifts. Alfonso Caso’s 1930s digs read a main-plaza building as propaganda of conquest. Marcus and Flannery note that huge core-periphery population gaps can make resistance look futile, easing takeover by colonists.
Aztec armies pushed into the valley in the 1450s, conquered in 1458, and built a fort at Huaxyácac (later Oaxaca City) in 1486. On 25 November 1521 Francisco de Orozco arrived; Zapotecs and Mixtecs soon submitted to Cortés’s authority in what Taylor called a comparatively peaceful conquest moment.
Building J on Monte Albán's main plaza, the structure Caso studied, is shaped like an arrowhead and carries more than 40 carved stones whose glyphs archaeologists read as provinces under Zapotec control. The people called themselves Be'ena'a, the Cloud People; Zapotec is a Nahuatl name meaning inhabitants of the place of sapote. Their languages belong to the ancient Oto-Manguean family, which began branching around 1500 BC, and they are tonal, with up to four tones: high, low, rising and falling.
Spanish rule reshaped the valley. After 1526 it became part of Cortés's Marquessate of the Valley of Oaxaca, Dominican friars settled from 1528 and a bishopric followed in 1535, and settlers brought horses, cattle, goats, sheep and chickens never seen there before. Smallpox, measles, typhoid and cocoliztli came in some nineteen major epidemics within a century, and one estimate has the native population falling from 1.5 million in 1520 to 150,000 by 1650 before it recovered. In January 2026 INAH archaeologists found a 1,400-year-old tomb whose entrance bears a great owl head framing the painted face of a Zapotec lord.
Source: Zapotec civilization
