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.

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Publisher: Museum of Anthropology

Year of Publication: 2015

Pages: 432

Price: $45.00

ISBN: 978-0-915703-86-9

Monograph Series and Number: Memoir 58