Abandoned, but Once Flourishing Pre-Columbian City Was Unearthed in Mexico

In southern Mexico, remote sensing technology has recently provided a snapshot of a 15th century archaeological site in its heyday, revealing a bustling city built by the pre-Columbian Zapotec culture. The site, known as Guiengola, was initially thought to be a fortress occupied by soldiers, but one researcher has found that it was actually an entire city complete with a network of internal roads and amenities like temples and ballcourts. 

The updated perspective of Guiengola, featured in a November study published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica, illustrates the political and social workings of the Zapotec civilization, which met its end at the hands of Spanish conquistadors in the early 16th century. The findings come from Pedro Guillermo Ramón Celis, a postdoctoral researcher at Montreal-based McGill University who revealed the original layouts of several remaining structures.

Guiengola, located in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, was once a lively city with an organized urban layout, Ramón Celis’ research found. Thought to have been built sometime during the Post-Classic Mesoamerican period (1350 to 1521), the city stood as a bastion of Zapotec culture, which first emerged in the late 6th century B.C. and flourished until the Spanish commenced their conquest of Central America. 

Ramón Celis brought the abandoned city to life with a remote sensing tool called lidar (light detection and ranging), which uses pulsing laser beams to provide three-dimensional topographic information about the surface of the Earth. 

“Although you could reach the site using a footpath, it was covered by a canopy of trees. 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,” said Ramón Celis in a statement.

This reconstruction revealed that Guiengola covered 360 hectares, included over 1,100 buildings and four kilometers of walls. Communal spaces like temples and ballcourts were used as well, likely by the elites of the city. 

An intriguing aspect of Guiengola was its social structure, shown by separation between elite and commoner neighborhoods. The neighborhoods consisted of kin-based dwellings that contained patios surrounded by rooms and would expand as extended families grew.

The study showed that the organization of the city suggested a distinctly communal atmosphere in which commoners and elite political decision-makers worked to expand and improve the city. Since the city was surrounded by mountains, inhabitants would incorporate geographic features like slopes and drainages into urban design. 

Read More: The Fall of the Aztec Empire: What Really Happened in the Battle of Tenochtitlan?

Ramón Celis believes the analysis of Guiengola could be a stepping stone to better understand the Zapotecs’ social and political organization, as well as how they interacted with Spanish forces. Evidence from the study indicated that the city was likely abandoned right before the Spanish arrived at the Oaxaca Valley in 1521 (afterward, it may have functioned as a fortress at times). The people of Guiengola subsequently moved to Tehuantepec, a small city just 20 kilometers away that’s still inhabited to this day. 

Before this, in the late 15th century, the Aztec Empire had begun to expand into the Oaxaca Valley, but its rise to power would not last long. Soon after, conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Central America and began the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1519, which ended in 1521 with the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. 

When the Zapotecs received news of this, they supposedly sent delegations to negotiate and seek an alliance with the Spaniards. However, Spanish soldiers would continue to spread through the Oaxaca Valley and impose their rule, all while spreading diseases that would devastate indigenous populations. Zapotec culture began to diminish due to forced cultural assimilation, but it didn't disappear entirely — today over 300,000 Zapotec people live in the state of Oaxaca, many still speaking the Zapotec languages and practicing cultural traditions. 

Although Guiengola is no longer standing, its remnants offer ample evidence of what it may have been like to live in this society. The structures, in particular, demonstrate just how advanced the lost city was.

“Because the city is only between 500 and 600 years old, it is amazingly well preserved, so you can walk there in the jungle, and you find that houses are still standing […] you can see the doors […] the hallways […] the fences that split it from other houses. So, it is easy to identify a residential lot. It's like a city frozen in time, before any of the deep cultural transformations brought by the Spanish arrival had taken place,” said Ramón Celis.

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

• Ancient Mesoamerica. Airborne lidar at Guiengola, Oaxaca: Mapping a Late Postclassic Zapotec city

• Science Advances. Origins of the Mesoamerican ballgame: Earliest ballcourt from the highlands found at Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico

• The National Museum of Language. Language of the Month: Zapotec

Jack Knudson is an assistant editor at Discover with a strong interest in environmental science and history. Before joining Discover in 2023, he studied journalism at the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University and previously interned at Recycling Today magazine.