Researchers Thought It Was Just a Fortress. It Turned Out to Be a Lost Zapotec City

Using laser scanning technologies, a researcher has identified a 15th-century city in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

The sprawling metropolis, known as Guiengola, was built by the Zapotecs, a pre-Columbian group that inhabited the region as early as the sixth century B.C.E. Researchers have known about the site for some time, but they’d assumed it was a fortress where soldiers were stationed.

The city is covered by a thick forest canopy, making it difficult to study. But in late 2022, Pedro Guillermo Ramón Celis, an anthropologist at McGill University in Canada, scanned Guiengola from above with lidar, a remote-sensing technology. He recently published his findings in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

At Guiengola’s peak, “I would say that at least 5,000 people were living permanently on the site,” Ramón Celis tells Live Science’s Owen Jarus. The city was likely inhabited for about 150 years—around 1350 to 1500—and then “abandoned a few decades before European contact in 1521,” he adds.

Ramón Celis’ mother’s family is from Tehuantepec, roughly 12 miles from Guiengola, and he remembers his relatives talking about the ruins when he was a child. As he says in a statement, “It was one of the reasons that I chose to go into archaeology.”

“Although you could reach the site using a footpath, it was covered by a canopy of trees,” Ramón Celis adds. “Until very recently, there would have been no way for anyone to discover the full extent of the site without spending years on the ground walking and searching. We were able to do it within two hours by using remote-sensing equipment and scanning from a plane.”

Guiengola spans some 890 acres and once boasted more than 1,100 buildings, per the statement. It contained about 2.5 miles of walls, a web of roads, temples, ball courts and residential neighborhoods separated by class.

When the Zapotecs built Guiengola, they had already expanded their reach throughout the Oaxacan region. In the process, they interacted with groups like the Aztecs, often in battle. According to records written by the Spanish, the Aztecs attacked Guiengola in 1497, but the Zapotecs held them off.

“Guiengola is a place of pride for the descendant Zapotec people, as it is where they defeated the Aztec invaders,” Ramón Celis tells the Art Newspaper’s Garry Shaw, adding: “It is often said that the Aztec Empire expanded almost without resistance across Mesoamerica during the 15th century; however, sites such as Guiengola help us understand that this was not the case.”

Right before the Spanish arrived, Guiengola appears to have been abandoned. Its people likely moved to Tehuantepec, located about 12 miles southeast of Guiengola.

“Because the city is only between 500 and 600 years old, it is amazingly well preserved,” Ramón Celis says in the statement. “It’s like a city frozen in time, before any of the deep cultural transformations brought by the Spanish arrival had taken place.”

Ramón Celis thinks Guiengola will provide insight into the Zapotec people’s political and social organization, shedding light on “their level of agency in negotiating with the Spanish,” per the statement. He’s planning to continue his research at the site later this year.

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.