Monte Albán II: the Zapotec state expands

Monte Albán was founded around 500 BC, and by the beginning of Period II, about 100 BC, it had an estimated 17,200 inhabitants. In Period II, which archaeologists date to about 100 BC – AD 200, the city expanded militarily, through co-option and by outright colonisation into areas beyond the Valley of Oaxaca: the Cañada de Cuicatlán to the north and the Ejutla and Sola de Vega valleys to the south.

More than forty large carved slabs of Monte Albán II date are set into the walls of Building J. They show place-names, often with upside-down heads; Alfonso Caso identified them as “conquest slabs” listing places that the Monte Albán elite claimed to have conquered or controlled, and in the Cañada de Cuicatlán a Zapotec conquest has been confirmed by excavation. Such carvings are part of the evidence that the Zapotecs had writing and calendrical notation. The dates are archaeological and approximate; the city kept its political pre-eminence until the end of the Late Classic period (about 500–750) and was then largely abandoned.