Understanding the Zapotecs’ level of political and social organization provides insight into their agency in negotiations with the Spanish.
A McGill University researcher has revealed that Guiengola, a 15th-century Zapotec site in southern Oaxaca, Mexico, was not merely a military fortress, as previously believed, but a vast, fortified city. Spanning 360 hectares, it contained more than 1,100 buildings, four kilometers of defensive walls, an extensive network of roads, and a well-organized urban layout featuring temples, communal spaces like ballcourts, and distinct neighborhoods for elites and commoners.
Pedro Guillermo Ramón Celis, a Banting postdoctoral researcher in McGill’s Department of Anthropology and author of a recent study in Ancient Mesoamerica, presents evidence suggesting that Guiengola was abandoned just before the Spanish arrived. Its inhabitants are believed to have relocated about 20 kilometers away to Tehuantepec, where their descendants still live today.
Ramón Celis said investigating how the Mesoamerican city was organized on the eve of the Spanish conquest is just the first step. He said he is convinced that as work on Guiengola advances, it will give researchers a better sense of the Zapotecs’ level of political and social organization, and thus a greater understanding of their level of agency in negotiating with the Spanish.
Revealing the City’s Layout Using Lidar Technology
The finding was made by using a remote sensing tool known as lidar (light detection and ranging). Lidar relies on pulsing laser beams, in a process akin to sonar, to provide precise, detailed, three-dimensional topographic information about what is on the earth’s surface, below the dense forest canopy.
“My mother’s family is from the region of Tehuantepec which is about 15 km from the site, and I remember them talking about it when I was a child. It was one of the reasons that I chose to go into archaeology,” Ramón Celis said. “Although you could reach the site using a footpath, it was covered by a canopy of trees. Until very recently, there would have been no way for anyone to discover the full extent of the site without spending years on the ground walking and searching. We were able to do it within two hours by using remote sensing equipment and scanning from a plane.”
By analyzing the data generated by the scans and using the Geo Analytic laboratory at McGill, Ramón Celis has been able to map the size and the layouts of the remaining built structures and infer their use based on the artifacts found at the locations.
To explore how power was distributed in the city, he calculated how much building space was given over to elite areas such as the temples and ballcourts, for example, compared to what was built in the areas used by commoners. Ballcourts were built in Mesoamerica for the purpose of practicing a ritual ballgame, and represent both the underworld and fertility, since they are a way of connecting with the ancestors and seeds grow below the soil, where the underworld is found.
Ramón Celis added, “Because the city is only between 500 and 600 years old, it is amazingly well preserved, so you can walk there in the jungle, and you find that houses are still standing… you can see the doors… the hallways… the fences that split it from other houses. So, it is easy to identify a residential lot. It’s like a city frozen in time, before any of the deep cultural transformations brought by the Spanish arrival had taken place.”
Reference: “Airborne lidar at Guiengola, Oaxaca: Mapping a Late Postclassic Zapotec city” by Pedro Guillermo Ramón Celis, 8 November 2024, Ancient Mesoamerica.
DOI: 10.1017/S0956536124000166
Funding: Wenner-Gren Foundation, Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences and now the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
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