The Zapotecs: princes, priests, and peasants

Although the Zapotecs have lost most of their cultural distinctiveness and undergone many changes, their way of life still displays links with a rich and fabled past. For more than three thousand years, the Zapotec-speaking peoples have occupied the fertile Valley of Oaxaca of southern Mexico – a region that was one of the earliest fully developed civilizations in America. There the Zapotec princely and priestly elites ruled a complex social and political organization, the theocratic state, and the Zapotec temple city of Monte Alban became one of the great cultural centers of Mesoamerica. The decline of the Zapotec civilization, and of Monte Alban as a civil and religious center, began before A.D. 900, with a shift toward divisive militarism, with the arrival of the Mixtecs in the thirteenth century and the rise of the Mixtec-Puebla culture, and with the invasion of the tribute-demanding Mexicas in the fifteenth century. The Zapotec princes’ elite status and most of the religious and political traditions ended. Finally, with the Spanish Conquest, when most of the Zapotecs and Mixtecs were reduced to rural, subject peasantry. This account of the Zapotecs and their worlds is what the author calls anthropological history. He draws on and integrates findings from archaeology, ethnology, ethnohistory, social anthropology, and other fields to reveal as fully as possible the worlds of the Zapotecs. The author, Joseph W. Whitecotton, was Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma.