Excavations at San José Mogote 2: The Cognitive Archaeology (Volume 58) (Memoirs)

San José Mogote is a 60-70 ha Formative site in the northern Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. Occupied for a thousand years before the city of Monte Albán was founded, San José Mogote sent most of its population to Monte Albán at 500 BC and was later reborn as a second-level administrative center for the Zapotec state.
The University of Michigan is publishing the final site report on San José Mogote in three volumes: first the household archaeology (published in 2005), then the cognitive archaeology (2015), and finally 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. 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.
Some readers may want to purchase both Excavations at San José Mogote 1: The Household Archaeology and Excavations at San José Mogote 2: The Cognitive Archaeology.