Kent V. Flannery and Joyce Marcus
San José Mogote is a 60-70 ha Formative site in the northern Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, which was occupied for a thousand years before the city of Monte Albán was founded.
The University of Michigan is publishing the final site report on San José Mogote in three volumes: Volume 1 (Excavations at San José Mogote 1: The Household Archaeology), published in 2005, described the household archaeology; Volume 2 documents the cognitive archaeology; and Volume 3 will explain the mortuary archaeology.
Excavations at San José Mogote 2: The Cognitive Archaeology (2015) deals with every building and feature that can shed light on indigenous ritual, religion, and political ideology. Filling 432 pages and utilizing more than 400 photographs and line drawings, this book describes in detail more than 35 public buildings, including men’s houses, one-room temples, a performance platform, two-room state temples, a ballcourt, and two types of palaces. These new empirical data allow the authors to reconstruct the evolution of complex Zapotec state religion from the simpler ritual features and buildings of Oaxaca’s earliest sedentary communities.
Order through the University of Michigan Press.
Read more about the Oaxaca Project at Archaeological Research in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Explore the other volumes in the Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca series here.
Publisher: Museum of Anthropology
Year of Publication: 2015
Location: Ann Arbor, MI
Pages: 432
Price: $45
Print ISBN: 978-0-915703-86-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-951519-68-1
Monograph Series / Number: Memoirs No. 58
Tables / Illustrations: 400+ photographs and drawings