An ancient Mexican city, Monte Alban, was the biggest settlement in the region and lasted for more than a thousand years. Some hypotheses for the city’s success are that people were drawn to fertile farmland in the area, or were forced to move there by powerful rulers. This new study challenges those ideas by showing that the land isn’t especially good for farming, and the society didn’t have the highly concentrated wealth and power that would come with a powerful ruler forcing people to move there. Instead, the city had a more collective form of government that could have attracted people to the city.
«We wanted to understand why Monte Alban was founded where it was,» says Linda Nicholas, the first author of the study in Frontiers in Political Science and an adjunct curator at the Field Museum.
Monte Alban lies in the Valley of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. It was founded in 500 BC, grew rapidly, and endured as the region’s main metropolis for 1,300 years, longer than most, if not all, other prehispanic Mesoamerican cities. «We’ve been working in the Oaxaca Valley for 40 years, and we and our colleagues have wondered what drew so many people to move to Monte Alban and its surrounding area, and what allowed the city to sustain itself for so long,» says Gary Feinman, the Field Museum’s MacArthur curator of anthropology and co-author of the study. «Over the years, a few competing ideas have been advanced.»
One hypothesis to explain the rapid growth at Monte Alban is coercion — the idea that powerful rulers forced people move there. Another possible explanation was that people went there because the land was good for farming. To examine the validity of these possible explanations, Nicholas and Feinman went back over decades of research covering both Monte Alban and the surrounding Valley of Oaxaca.
To evaluate the argument that Monte Alban attracted people because of the quality of its farmland, the researchers drew on studies of modern land use in the valley to map out different land classes based on the availability and permanence of water, the most important factor for crop yields in the valley. Good, well-watered land was patchily distributed across the valley, so that some areas had much higher potential yields than others. While pre-Monte Alban settlements were more heavily concentrated in the most productive parts of the valley, Monte Alban was not. Land quality was less a factor in settlement decisions at the time of Monte Alban’s foundation, both for the city and nearby settlements.
«Linda’s analysis of land use shows very clearly that Monte Alban wasn’t located near the richest land. Whether you just look at the land itself, or whether you figure in the labor to work it, agrarian productivity cannot explain the location of Monte Alban,» says Feinman.
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