The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (38 page)

It is significant that by this time men’s houses had disappeared from Oaxaca’s archaeological record. The transition to rank society was now complete.

With rival chiefs challenging San José Mogote, its elite implemented various strategies to hold onto their satellite villages. It appears that one strategy was to send women of high rank to marry the leaders of those satellite communities. This strategy, called
hypogamy
(a Greek word used when a woman marries a man of lower rank), raised the status of the satellite village’s leader, much the way a Shan bride raised the status of a Kachin chief.

Our best evidence for hypogamy comes from Fábrica San José, a five-acre village some three miles east of San José Mogote. Fábrica San José was an economically important satellite for San José Mogote because its saline springs supplied the entire region with salt.

FIGURE 27.
   This temple at Huitzo, Mexico, built 2,800 years ago, was a one-room building without the usual sitting bench or lime-filled pit of earlier men’s houses. It was elevated on an earthen platform, given a 25-foot-wide staircase, and provided with incense burners.

Between 2,800 and 2,600 years ago, the richest burials at Fábrica San José were those of women. Some of those women displayed the same type of cranial deformation seen among high-status families at San José Mogote and had likely come from the latter village. Burial 39 was interred with a pendant, 53 beads of jadeite/serpentinite, and a drinking vessel of elegant white pottery imported from outside the valley. Burial 54 was laid to rest with six fine gray pottery vessels, offerings of seashells, and a large, hollow ceramic sculpture representing an ancestor.

Between 2,700 and 2,500 years ago, San José Mogote rebounded from the challenges of the previous era and solidified its place as the most influential chiefly center in the Valley of Oaxaca. There were now between 70 and 85 villages in the 810-square-mile valley, which is shaped like a three-pointed star. San José Mogote occupied the northern arm of the star and was surrounded by 18 to 23 smaller satellite villages. In the eastern arm of the star, the most important chiefly center was Yegüih, which may have had eight to ten satellites of its own. In the southern arm, San Martín Tilcajete was still the largest chiefly center and may have had eight to ten satellite communities.

So great was the rivalry among these three chiefly societies that the center of the valley, where all three arms converged, was left as a virtually unoccupied buffer zone or “no-man’s-land.” This buffer zone, covering 30 square miles, was evidently considered a dangerous place to live.

During this period, San José Mogote built the largest and most impressive temple in the valley. To ensure that this temple would be visible from a great distance, the builders chose a 40-foot hill that was the village’s most prominent landmark. The new temple, built about 2,600 years ago, was placed above the ruins of an abandoned men’s house.

The temple itself had extra-thick walls of cane bundles, daubed with clay and whitewashed. Its floor was recessed into an adobe brick platform measuring 46 by 43 feet. Buried beneath each of the temple’s four corners were large serving vessels—brown vessels below the northeast and southwest corners and gray vessels below the northwest and southeast. These bowls, which might have held food for celebrants during the temple’s inaugural ceremonies, had been buried as dedicatory offerings. Lying broken on the floor of the temple was an imitation stingray spine for ritual bloodletting, chipped from a large blade of imported volcanic glass.

The adobe platform mentioned earlier was in turn supported by an even larger stone masonry platform, whose earliest construction stage was 55 feet on a side and more than six feet high. This platform was enlarged at least twice. Its final stage measured 93 by 70 feet and was built of limestone blocks weighing up to half a ton. These blocks had been brought from a quarry three miles away; they would have to have been rafted across a river and hauled to the top of the hill.

Unfortunately for its builders, even this impressive temple was not immune from raiding. Late in its history, it was the scene of an intense fire that destroyed the building and converted much of its clay daub to glassy cinders. To vitrify clay in that way, the fire must have been deliberately set.

The villagers of San José Mogote responded to the desecration of their temple in several ways. First they built a new temple only a short distance to the north. The new temple was constructed of sturdier adobe walls over stone masonry foundations. The platform beneath it was made of the same kinds of limestone blocks used for the earlier temple but stacked even higher. A radiocarbon date from one of its wooden posts shows the temple to have been built 2,590 years ago.

A second response to the burning of the earlier temple seems to have been violent retaliation. This retaliation was commemorated on a carved stone slab, installed as the threshold for a narrow corridor flanking the new temple. Anyone entering or leaving this corridor would have stepped on the figure carved on the upper surface of the slab. The carving depicts a naked man sprawled awkwardly on his back, with mouth open and eyes closed (
Figure 28
). A complex motif shows where his chest had been opened to remove the heart during sacrifice. A ribbonlike stream of blood extends from this motif to the border of the monument, ending in two stylized drops of blood. Between the feet of this sacrificial victim is his Zapotec hieroglyphic name. The fact that his name was added to the monument indicates that he was an enemy of some importance, that is, a member of a rival chiefly family.

We do not know from which enemy village the victim came. We do know that over the next century or so, the rival chiefly center of San Martín Tilcajete erected its own important temple (
Figure 29
). Built 2,500 years ago, this temple was excavated by archaeologists Charles Spencer and Elsa Redmond. The architects of Tilcajete first built a platform with stone masonry retaining walls and earthen fill, three and a half feet high and measuring 40 by 25 feet. Atop this platform they built a one-room temple measuring 22 by 9 feet, distinguished by its two built-in basins for burnt offerings. Associated with this temple were fragments of braziers for burning incense, a common activity in later Zapotec temples.

FIGURE 28.
   This carved stone at San José Mogote, Mexico, formed the threshold for a corridor between the old and new versions of a 2,600-year-old temple. It gives the hieroglyphic name of an elite enemy whose heart has been removed, leaving a stream of blood that runs off the edge of the stone and down the side. The monument was just under five feet long.

FIGURE 29.
   The stone foundation for a temple built 2,500 years ago at Tilcajete, Mexico. This temple, measuring 9 by 22 feet, had two built-in fire basins and a series of incense burners.

Oaxaca’s Rank Societies in Regional Perspective

Multiple lines of evidence, as we have seen, suggest that rank societies arose in the Valley of Oaxaca between 3,200 and 3,100 years ago. Of Goldman’s three sources of chiefly power, we believe that religious authority was uppermost. For one thing, the most elite-looking households and burials had more vessels carved with references to Earth and Sky than did their lower-ranked neighbors. For another thing, the temple gradually replaced the men’s house. This suggests that the worship of the supernatural spirit (or spirits) in the genealogy of the chiefly line had become a community concern.

What happened in Oaxaca, however, did not happen in a vacuum. Chiefly societies were arising over all of central and southern Mexico, an area many times the size of Colombia’s Cauca Valley. From the Basin of Mexico in the north (the region of present-day Mexico City) to the Pacific coast of Chiapas in the south, social inequality was growing.

One indication that all these emerging rank societies were in contact with each other is that vessels carved with Earth and Sky motifs were actively exchanged by their elites. An analysis of minerals in the clay of the vessels, for example, suggests that villages in the Basin of Mexico, the Puebla and Oaxaca valleys, and the Gulf coast of Veracruz all exchanged carved pottery.

This exchange system probably resembled the circulation of heraldic crests among the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian and the movement of pottery and goldwork among chiefly families in Panama and Colombia. It is the kind of exchange that leads chiefly families to become the patrons of skilled artisans. In the Mexican case our impression is that although the Basin of Mexico was not home to the largest and most powerful rank societies of this era, its craftsmen produced the most elegant pottery and large, hollow ceramic sculptures. That would make its potters the Mexican equivalent of the Quimbaya goldsmiths.

It is likely that all the rank societies of this era went through cycles like those of the Konyak Naga and Kachin. From 2,850 to 2,700 years ago, as we have seen, rival chiefs arose to challenge the supremacy of Oaxaca’s largest rank society. That society regained its preeminent position, but only through the multiple strategies of building impressive temples, attracting new satellite communities, sending elite women to marry the leaders of those satellites, and using war parties to capture and sacrifice rival elites. This increased use of raiding transformed highland Mexican society from Irving Goldman’s “traditional” type, based mainly on religious authority, to a more powerful type that combined religious authority, military expansion, and chiefly support of craftsmen.

Now the Valley of Oaxaca had reached an important threshold. Three rival chiefly societies glared at each other across a sparsely occupied buffer zone. The northernmost of those societies was the largest, but its size advantage was insufficient to eliminate the others. What happened next was without precedent for the region and led, after several centuries of struggle, to the creation of one of Mexico’s first kingdoms. That remarkable process will be described in a later chapter.

FROM RITUAL HOUSE TO TEMPLE IN CENTRAL PERU

When we last discussed the Peruvian site of La Galgada, its talc-plastered ritual houses had just been replaced by a large U-shaped temple. The time was roughly 3,500 years ago, half a millennium before the first temples were built in Oaxaca.

In fact, some societies on the central coast of Peru were building temples even before La Galgada did. Let us turn first to the valley of the Río Supe, 90 miles north of Lima. The Supe River begins high in the Andes, descends through dusty canyons like the one supporting La Galgada, and breaks out onto the coastal plain some 15 to 20 miles from the sea. The final 15 miles of its floodplain supported a high density of settlements during the Late Archaic period, and some of those settlements built what appear to be temples.

An archaeological team led by Ruth Shady surveyed ten square miles of the Supe Valley and located 18 sites of the Late Archaic period (4,500 to 3,800 years ago). The three largest sites were Era de Pando (197 acres), Caral (143 acres), and Pueblo Nuevo (135 acres). Near the mouth of the river lay Áspero, a 37-acre site with monumental architecture.

The Late Archaic societies of the Supe Valley were supported by a mix of agriculture, fishing, and foraging. There are suggestions that inland horticulturalists sent cotton and gourds to the coastal fishermen, who reciprocated by sending dried anchovies and sardines to the horticulturalists.