Excavation At San Jos Mogote 1

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. 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.

"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. Many basic concepts of indigenous belief endured for thousands of years, but dramatic innovations signaled the periodic transformation of Zapotec religion to keep up with changes in society and politics."--

In 1974, Michael E. Whalen excavated the Formative site of Tomaltepec, a village with houses, public buildings, and a large cemetery. Here he reports on the results of the excavation and provides a regional perspective on Formative period development in the Valley of Oaxaca.

Agency in Archaeology is the first critical volume to scrutinise the concept of agency and to examine in-depth its potential to inform our understanding of the past. Theories of agency recognise that human beings make choices, hold intentions and take action. This offers archaeologists scope to move beyond looking at broad structural or environmental change and instead to consider the individual and the group Agency in Archaeology brings together nineteen internationally renowned scholars who have very different, and often conflicting, stances on the meaning and use of agency theory to archaeology. The volume is composed of five theoretically-based discussions and nine case studies, drawing on regions from North America and Mesoamerica to Western and central Europe, and ranging in subject from the late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers to the restructuring of gender relations in the north-eastern US.