San José Mogote

San José Mogote is a pre-Columbian archaeological site of the Zapotec, a Mesoamerican culture that flourished in the region of what is now the Mexican state of Oaxaca. A forerunner to the better-known Zapotec site of Monte Albán, San José Mogote was the largest and most important settlement in the Valley of Oaxaca during the Early and Middle Formative periods (ca. 1500-500 BCE) of Mesoamerican cultural development. Situated in the fertile bottomlands of the Etla arm of the Valley of Oaxaca, the site is surrounded by the present-day village of San José Mogote, about 7.5 miles (12.1 kilometers) northwest of the city of Oaxaca (Evans 2004:122). San José Mogote is considered to be the oldest permanent agricultural village in the Oaxaca Valley and probably the first settlement in the area to use pottery. It has also "...produced Mexico's oldest known defensive palisades and ceremonial buildings (1300 B.C), early use of adobe (850 B.C), the first evidence of Zapotec hieroglyphic writing (600 B.C), and early examples of architectural terracing, craft specialization, and irrigation (1150-850 B.C)." Archaeological investigations conducted during the late 20th century over two decades (e.g, by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus) have built an emerging picture of San José Mogote as an early center of Zapotec culture; it was later supplanted or overtaken by Monte Albán. From its beginning

Archaeological site data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).