The Monte Albán hills appear to have…

The Monte Albán hills appear to have been uninhabited prior to 500 BCE (the end of the Rosario ceramic phase), when San José Mogote was the major population center in the valley and head of a chiefdom that likely controlled much of the northern Etla branch (Marcus and Flannery 1996).

Perhaps as many as three or four other smaller chiefly centers controlled other sub-regions of the valley, including Tilcajete in the southern Valle Grande branch and Yegüih in the Tlacolula arm to the east.

Competition and warfare seem to have characterized the Rosario phase, and the regional survey data suggests the existence of an unoccupied buffer zone between the San José Mogote chiefdom and those to the south and east (Marcus and Flannery 1996).

It is within this no-man's land that at the end of the Rosario period Monte Albán was founded, quickly reaching a population estimate of around fifty-two hundred by the end of the following Monte Albán Ia phase (circa 300 BCE).

This remarkable population increase was accompanied by an equally rapid decline at San José Mogote and neighboring satellite sites, making it likely that its chiefly elites were directly involved in the founding of the future Zapotec capital.

This rapid shift in population and settlement, from dispersed localized settlements to a central urban site in a previously unsettled area, has been referred to as the “Monte Alban Synoikism” by Marcus and Flannery (1996:140-146) in reference to similar recorded instances in the Mediterranean area in antiquity.

it was previously thought (Blanton 1978) that a similar process of large-scale abandonment, and thus participation in the founding of Monte Albán, occurred at other major chiefly centers such as Yegüih and Tilcajete, but this now appears to be unlikely, at least in the case of the latter center.

A recent project directed by Charles Spencer and Elsa Redmond of the American Museum of Natural History in New York has shown that rather than being abandoned the site actually grew significantly in population during the periods Monte Albán Early I and Late I (circa 500 to 300 BCE and 300 to 100 BCE, respectively) and might have actively opposed incorporation into the increasingly powerful Monte Albán state (Spencer and Redmond 2001).