After Monte Alban: Transformation and Negotiation in Oaxaca, Mexico (Mesoamerican Worlds: from the Olmecs to the Danzantes)

Reveals the richness and interregional relevance of Post-classic transformations in the area now known as Oaxaca, which lies between Central Mexico and the Maya area and, as contributors to this volume demonstrate, achieved cultural centrality in pan-Mesoamerican networks. Large nucleated states throughout Oaxaca collapsed after 700CE, including the great Zapotec state centred in the Valley of Oaxaca, Monte Alban. Elite culture changed in fundamental ways as small city-states proliferated in Oaxaca, each with a new ruling dynasty required to devise novel strategies of legitimisation.The vast majority of the population, though, sustained continuity in lifestyle, religion, and cosmology. Contributors synthesise these regional transformations and continuities in the lower Rio Verde Valley, the Valley of Oaxaca, and the Mixteca Alta. They provide data from material culture, architecture, codices, ethnohistoric documents, and ceramics, including a revised ceramic chronology from the Late Classic to the end of the Post-classic that will be crucial to future investigations.