Zapotec writing. Knowledge, power, and memory in ancient Oaxaca

218 Pages·2005·1.558 MB·English

by  Javier Urcid

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION 3
Part I- THE ZAPOTEC SCRIBAL TRADITION
KNOWLEDGE, WRITING, AND CALENDRICS 5
ALTERNATIVE METHODS IN THE STUDY OF THE ZAPOTEC SCRIPT 9
STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF THE ZAPOTEC WRITING SYSTEM 12
THE ANCIENT ZAPOTEC CALENDAR 15
Part II- WRITING IN MONUMENTAL CONTEXTS
RULERSHIP, POWER, AND PUBLIC DISPLAYS 19
FELINES AND THE ROYAL DYNASTIES FROM MONTE ALBÁN 21
JAGUAR LORDS AND THE PRIMORDIAL COVENANT 26
Part III- WRITING IN DOMESTIC CONTEXTS
MEMORY AND THE CONTINUITY OF CORPORATE GROUPS 27
ZAPOTEC MORTUARY PRACTICES 28
ZAPOTEC SOCIAL ORGANIZATION DURING THE EARLY COLONIAL PERIOD 44
THE RITUAL CALENDAR, NAMES OF INDIVIDUALS, AND GENEALOGICAL RECORDS 46
Tomb 104 from Monte Albán 49
Tomb 5 from Cerro de la Campana, Suchilquitongo 67
The Exterior Façade 81
The Interior Vestibule 82
The West Room 83
The East Room 87
The Entrance to the Main Chamber 91
The Main Chamber 92
The Stela and Text II 98
Other Epigraphic Materials in the Tomb 106
The Programs in the Tomb as an Integrated Narrative 107
PORTABLE GENEALOGICAL SLABS 115
The Carved Slab MNA-6-6059 116
Previous Studies of the Slab 118
An Alternative View of the Slab 124
GENEALOGICAL RECORDS DISPLAYED IN MAUSOLEUMS 132
A Carved Stone in a Private Collection 133
The Imagery on the Stone 134
The Carved Block as Part of a Larger Composition 143
Part IV- DISCUSSION 147
Part V- CONCLUSION 154
Acknowledgements 157
Bibliography 158
List of Figures 184
List of Tables 195
Tables not inserted in the text 197
Appendix 1 214
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INTRODUCTION
Since the publication of “Zapotec Hieroglyphic Writing” (Urcid 2001) prevailing
methodological constrains in pursuing issues concerning the phonetic decipherment of the script has
prompted me to extend a broader semiotic cast onto the available inscriptions, focusing on their
semasiographic component and exploring not only semiological relations between image and text
but also paying particular attention to the physical backdrops by means of which writing was
displayed. From such a perspective, the definition of “decipherment” acquires a different meaning.
I still maintain that an understanding of how speech is graphically encoded in the script is critical to
elucidate the actual content of the inscriptions and that these are crucial steps for a more
comprehensive view of the Zapotec scribal tradition and its societal uses, but acknowledge that by
extending the contextual framework of analysis beyond the epigraphic one it is feasible to bring
insights concerning semantic meanings embedded in the visual communication and ultimately
throw light on the broader cultural code underlying the production and apprehension of writing.
The aim of this essay is therefore to highlight how the construction of knowledge (astronomical,
calendrical, mantic, and scribal) was linked to the production of social memory and ultimately to
political and economic power. My intent is not to cover such links throughout the known uses of
the script, uses than spanned more than a thousand years. Rather, I will focus on the scribal
production that occurred between the 5th and 9th centuries after the Common Era.
In doing so I will rely on the cornerstones that I laid out in “Zapotec Writing”, especially on
the conclusions regarding the structure of the Zapotec Calendar Round and the reconstruction of the
20-day name list of the mantic calendar. I will also incorporate or build upon the exegesis of some
inscribed materials published before and after “Zapotec Hieroglyphic Writing” that were aimed
mostly to Spanish readers and that appear in forums perhaps seldom read by English speakers. I
will begin the exposition by providing a general introduction to Zapotec writing and by commenting
explicitly on the methods that I have employed in studying the ancient script. Subsequently, I will
discuss two broader contexts in which writing was deployed: the monumental and the domestic.
While the former may have exposed particular inscriptions to wider audiences in a more direct way,
the latter may have accomplished the same albeit indirectly.
The example that I will use to illustrate the link between writing and political power centers
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on the carved monoliths that were found forming the corners of the South Platform at Monte Albán.
While this example may seem already familiar, as it was amply detailed in chapter 5 of “Zapotec
Writing”, its recapitulation in this context is framed within a discussion of a series of rulers from
Monte Albán that can now be identified based on semasiographic and epigraphic data, and the
reiteration of the case serves to introduce a newly found carved monolith that was evidently part of
one of the two sequential narrative programs that were rendered in these monoliths.
To illustrate the link between writing and the production of memory, I will conduct an
analysis of writing in elite domestic contexts. Much of the surviving instantiations of “household”
writing are found in mortuary contexts, and such inscribed practices include genealogical records
and allusions to a rich ritual life that centered on ancestor veneration. I will therefore focus on the
exegesis of four kinds of epigraphic and semasiographic materials, namely painted tomb murals,
portable carved slabs, blocks that formed composite friezes decorating mausoleums, and tableaus of
ceramic effigy vessels. Yet, before specific exemplars of these types of visual records can be
approached, I embark in an even broader contextual analysis that lays out key aspects of Zapotec
mortuary practices, reviewing not only the skeletal evidence but also the associated material culture
and the architectural settings of burials. The particular cases that I will use to “read” the cultural
code underlying elite domestic writing include the inscribed materials from tomb 104 at Monte
Albán and from tomb 5 at Cerro de la Campana, near Santiago Suchilquitongo. I also delve into an
alternative interpretation of a portable slab that, although commented and published by other
scholars before, had not been examined through semiotic lenses. To discuss genealogical records
that were displayed in mausoleums, I will introduce as centerpiece a carved block now in a private
collection in the United States.
Both the exegesis of the mortuary narrative program from tomb 104 at Monte Albán and the
interpretation of the carved block in the private collection incorporate examples that illustrate how
tableaus of ceramic effigy vessels, some of them veritable three-dimensional renditions of
“glyphs”, were an integral component of varied technologies of communication in the service of
elite interests. Given that the ceramic chronology of the central valleys of Oaxaca has been
expanded and refined since Caso and his colleagues first outlined a general framework (Flannery
1968, Flannery and Marcus 1994, Lind 1991, Marcus 1983, Markens 2003, Martínez López 1994,
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Martínez López et al 2000), I am introducing here an alternative series of phase names that reflect
those changes (Table 1.1).1

Part I- THE ZAPOTEC SCRIBAL TRADITION
The script that was used in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca constitutes the earliest evidence
of writing in the American continent (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The first tangible, yet piece-meal
manifestations of the graphic system can be dated to approximately 600 years before the
Common Era (Flannery and Marcus 2003). This precocious Mesoamerican script had
subsequently a long trajectory of use that lasted more than 1,500 years.
While the earliest known inscription comes from San José Mogote, a settlement that
reached its political peak before the establishment of Monte Albán, the largest corpus of
inscribed monuments has been documented at this later settlement, including a sizable set of
exemplars that date to the times shortly after its foundation. From this evidence it has been
surmised that the inception of writing in Oaxaca is related to chiefly competition, and to
increasing forms of political centralization that eventually led to statehood and urban life
(Marcus 1992a: 227, 1992b: 32-41; Marcus and Flannery 1996: 130).
The early evidence of writing in Oaxaca does not necessarily imply that the Zapotecs
invented the first Mesoamerican system of phonetic writing. The nature of the archaeological
record generates differential preservation of the media through which writing was probably
conveyed, and since it is plausible that early scribes used as well perishable materials like wood,
cloth, bark paper, and deer hides, several aspects of the origin of writing and its early societal
uses in Oaxaca and in Mesoamerica in general may lay beyond our reach.
The semasiographic theme associated with the known early inscriptions spanning between

1 The new phase names from 500 BCE to 1521 ACE and their chronometric anchorage were accorded
by Lind, Markens, Martínez, Urcid, and Winter during a meeting in Oaxaca City in the summer of
2003.
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600 BCE to about 200 ACE, and found at the ancient settlements of San José Mogote, Monte
Albán, and Dainzu, appear to be related to a set of sacred propositions linking self-sacrifice, the
oracular invocation of ancestors to ensure success in warfare raids, the taking of captives, ritual
combat with them, and the enactment of human immolation to petition for agricultural and
human fertility (Figure 1.3) (Urcid 1998a and 1999a). The elaboration and monopoly by the
elites of an ideology that centers on a primordial covenant between humans and the divine (Joyce
1997, 2000; Joyce and Winter 1996), and their choice to commission the carving of monuments
that bolster community well-being instead of the self-aggrandizement of paramount and
charismatic leaders suggest that early forms of political centralization in Oaxaca were corporate,
or at least presented as such, rather than exclusionary (Blanton et al. 1996). This in turn suggests
that some of the societal uses of writing served the purpose of internal power building strategies
stemming from factionalism (Brumfiel 1992: 557) and the masking of inequalities by promoting
group identities, the latter being crucial in the context of synoikism.2
If so, the social process that may have lead to the origins of pristine writing in Oaxaca may
not be that different in terms of identity formation from those leading to secondary scribal
developments. Many if not all instances of recent, historically documented inventions of writing
that sprang from native contexts, like the Cherokee (Walker 1981: 146-153; Walker and
Sarbaugh 1993), Vai (Dalby 1970), and Hmong (Smalley et al. 1990), are known to have
developed in the context of messianic movements aimed at promoting and reinforcing social and
cultural values in the face of oppression emanating from unequal power relations. However, an
important difference between primary and secondary developments of writing is that pristine
cases seemingly unfolded in the context of power contestations (power over), while the latter did

2 The “coming together” of communities for the founding of Monte Albán in the model of disembedded
capital (Blanton 1978) and the model of synoikism (Marcus and Flannery 1996) imply cooperation in
the face of external competition. The difference is that the former model involves a confederation
against archaeologically unattested competitors outside the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, while the latter
model attempts to account for the settlement data known from within the Central Valleys.
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so as expressions of resistance (power to) (see also Houston 2004a: 10).
While the maximum extent of Zapotec style inscriptions has not been determined yet, it is
now clear that the script was eventually used in several regions closer and distant to the Central
Valleys of Oaxaca. The processes by which scribal practices extended over such a wide area
were most likely varied. In some instances it must have been directly imposed by the powerful
polity centered at Monte Albán, but in other cases one may assume that emulation by elites of
autonomous polities led them to appropriate the script.
Major loci of carved monuments bearing Zapotec style inscriptions outside of the Central
Valleys of Oaxaca are located in the Northern Sierra (Figure 1.4) (see also Oudijk and Urcid
1997), the Eastern Mountains (Figure 1.5), the valleys of Ejutla and Sola (Figure 1.6) (see also
Marcus 2002), the Southern Sierra (Figure 1.7), and the Pacific littoral of Oaxaca and Guerrero
(Figure 1.8) (see also Urcid 1993, Urcid and Joyce 2001). Although much research is needed to
determine the easternmost extent of Zapotec style writing, inscribed monuments from the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec and Chiapas (Figures 1.9 and 7.11, upper right) bearing a different
graphic style may be instantiations of a fluctuating boundary of scribal traditions.3 Another
boundary that delimits the northwestern extent of inscriptions in Zapotec style involves parts of
the Mixteca Alta and the Mixteca Baja, where another distinct scribal tradition developed
between the 4th and 8th centuries after the Common Era (Figure 1.10). Current evidence suggests
that this tradition, known as Ñuiñe, derived from the Zapotec script and played an important role
in mutual borrowings with the Central Mexican tradition, particularly in the forms of visual
communication attested at Teotihuacan, Xochicalco, Teotenango, and Cacaxtla.
By the 10th century after the Common Era, and apparently as the result of the political
collapse of Monte Albán, the Zapotec script began being replaced by another style of writing
whose subsequent trajectory led to a phonic and decidedly “open” script exemplified, for
instance, by the inscribed bones found in tomb 7 at Monte Albán, the painted murals in Mitla,

3 The few known examples of the Middle Classic period script from Chiapas seemingly conforms an
“open” writing system (Houston 2004b: 275).
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and the surviving screenfolds from the neighboring mountainous region of the Mixteca Alta. By
the 13th century ACE this later form of writing (in Mixteca-Puebla style) eventually became
widespread too, encompassing most of Southwestern Mesoamerica and other distant regions
(Figure 1.11). The paucity of inscriptions spanning between the 10th and 13th centuries ACE
makes it difficult to model the specific processes that may have lead to the obsolescence of the
Zapotec style script (Houston, Baines, and Cooper 2003: 435). A sociolinguistic explanation
related to its loss of prestige may be applicable, but so far little is known of a target, more
prestigious writing systems that may have been adopted. The genealogical and historiographic
(dating of events) content of the few known inscriptions produced during those centuries is
similar to one of the societal uses of Zapotec style writing that prevailed until the 10th century, so
the ‘sphere of exchange’ model, which implies shifts in the uses of the script, does not seem to
apply. The ‘demographic’ model, in which the specialization of writing and reading became
increasingly confined to a smaller group of knowledgeable practitioners may have played a role,
but if so it is evident that eventually the number of scribes and readers increased at least by the
13th century ACE.
An apparently striking contrast between Zapotec and Mixteca-Puebla style writing is the
media of presentation. Most of the known written record in the latter style is in the form of
screenfolds or was rendered in portable objects, and except for a few instances, there is as of yet
a paucity of monumental inscriptions (Fig. 1.12).4 Zapotec style writing in several parts of
Oaxaca, on the other hand, was frequently deployed in monumental backdrops, and no pre-
Hispanic screenfolds in the Zapotec script are known. Such a difference is certainly due to the

4 Marcus (1976: 133-134) incorrectly attributed to the Late Formative or Early Classic some of the
carved stones from Teotitlan del Valle illustrated in Figure 1.12, including TEO-03, TEO-06, TEO-07,
TEO-08, and TEO-18. A Late Postclassic date of what must have been a narrative program set in an
architectural context is evinced by the way the feet of the personages are rendered, as well as by
attributes of the headdresses and the objects being carried, including the depiction of shields and darts.
The church in the community, where several of the carved stones are embedded today, was built on
top of a monumental complex that included a palace like those at Mitla, decorated as well by
entablatures with a variety of step-fret designs. It is known that the Postclassic occupation in Teotitlan
del Valle was, together with Sa’a Yucu (near Cuilapan de Guerrero) and Mitla, a Rank I settlement in
the Central Valleys (Kowalewski et al 1989: 317).
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perishable quality of books and to archaeological sampling bias. We know for instance that in
the sixteenth century, Friar Juan de Córdova recorded the Zapotec divinatory calendar in the
Tlacolula arm of the Valley of Oaxaca while looking at a screenfold painted in Mixteca-Puebla
style (Seler 1904, Urcid 1992a, Whitecotton 1982). As to the apparent paucity of monumental
inscriptions in Mixteca-Puebla style, perhaps the balkanized political landscape of Oaxaca during
the Late Postclassic rendered economically and socially burdensome for a single polity to engage
in the procurement, mobilization, carving, and setting of inscriptions in monumental contexts.
While continuities between the two forms of writing are discernible, not only in regard to their
‘openness’ and in specific aspects of the graphic systems but also in terms of underlying
ideological principles that have pervaded through millennia, there are also marked differences
between Zapotec style writing and the later scribal tradition, differences that were most likely
brought about by particular socio-political factors.
At the eve of the Spanish intrusion and conquest of Southwestern Mesoamerica, a number
of regional writing styles seemingly derived from the Mixteca-Puebla style proliferated in
several parts of Oaxaca, particularly in the production of lienzos. Much of this native scribal
production was used to make territorial claims in the context of the Spanish administrative
system, in litigations between native elites and between them and Spaniards (Figure 1.13). As
early as the later part of the 16th century, Zapotec peoples appropriated the Spanish alphabetical
system to render graphically their own language, writing surreptitiously about their traditions
(Figure 1.14). This strategy for reaffirming their identity and their past based on the use of an
alphabetic script continues to this very day.

ALTERNATIVE METHODS IN THE STUDY OF THE ZAPOTEC SCRIPT
During the first half of the 20th century, several scholars had already inklings that Zapotec
style writing encoded certain aspects of a spoken language. Yet, the majority of subsequent
studies have shied away from linguistic considerations. Such methodological myopia is due in
part to the difficulty in demonstrating that early inscriptions were produced by speakers of an
ancient version of the Zapotec languages that today are still spoken in Oaxaca by nearly half a
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million people.5 The assessment of a partial overlap between Zapotec style inscriptions and the
distribution of the Zapotecan languages attested from the 16th century onwards, made possible
only after assembling data at a macro-regional level, favors such a conclusion. In addition, the
pervasive continuity in certain aspects of the script, evinced in the accumulated data currently
available, adds support to argue that even the earliest known inscriptions from Oaxaca must
encode an ancestral version of contemporary Zapotec dialects. Yet, two major drawbacks that
have impeded phonetic decipherment are the lack of an ancient biscript and of a linguistic
synthesis on the variability within the Zapotecan family of languages that would enable to better
define linguistic clades and phylogeny (Nichols 1997) and draw an outline of the core properties
of the ancestral languages through time (but see Fernández de Miranda 1995, Kaufman n.d., and
Swadesh 1947). These obstacles, however, do not justify interpretative attempts that ignore the
linguistic mappings potentially inherent in the writing system.
The first step in the study of any system of writing is the gathering of a sample of
inscriptions that are as faithfully reproduced as possible. In contrast to the data available for
other Mesoamerican scripts, like Isthmian, Maya, or Aztec, the number of available Zapotec
inscriptions is relatively small. Yet, the research of the last two centuries strongly suggest that
the paucity of data does not mean scribes in ancient Oaxaca seldom practiced their specialty, but
rather that archaeological searches for inscriptions in non perishable media have to focus on the
appropriate loci of scribal production and display. With the corpus of inscriptions collected thus
far it is feasible to implement two alternative methods to study the script, namely contextual and
comparative.
The contextual method aims at understanding inscriptions in relation to their settings and
their material backdrops. In the Zapotec case this means architectural contexts and their closest

5 According to the 2000 Mexican Federal census there were 452 887 Zapotec speakers (including
zapoteco, zapoteco de Cuixtla, zapoteco de Ixtlán, zapoteco del Istmo, zapoteco del rincón, zapoteco
sureño, zapoteco vallista and zapoteco vijano) (http://www.inegi.gob.mx).