Mexican Zapotec rugs, blankets, weavings
Mexican Zapotec Native American Indian history - page 4 of 7

The central region of the state of Oaxaca Mexico is extraordinarily mountainous. Several impassible mountain ranges and their vast spurs enter the area at various angles and come into crisscross collision. The result is a tortured terrain fragmented into dramatic precipices and abrupt gorges, a few of which level out into wide and splendid valleys and innumerable smaller vales and dales at various levels of altitude. The continent nearly breaks in two at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, part of which lies in Oaxaca. The coastal areas are excessively hot and humid; the mountain chains high, cold, inhospitable and cloud-wrapped; the valleys temperate, well watered, and smiling. These valleys cradled one of mankind's phenomenal and distinctive cultures. The ruins of more than two hundred ancient cities and towns are presently recorded and more than a thousand sites are listed as archaeologically important. Some of these ancient towns, still inhabited but reduced to the size of tiny hamlets, have archaeological time-columns which extend back to 600 B.C., Epoch I of Monte Alban.

For 3.5 millennia people who have been recognizably Zapotec have inhabited the central valleys and surrounding mountains of today's Mexican state of Oaxaca. From their origins as hunter-gatherers, whose ancestors settled in the region as long as 10 - 13 millennia ago, the Zapotec peoples learned to adapt to the varied environments of the state, domesticated a number of wild species that are now important cultigens, organized urban centers and developed great political entities. Several studies estimate that the number of Zapotecs at the time of the Spanish conquest was between 350,000 and half million. The history of these people has not garnered the same attention that has been given that of the Maya and Aztec, and indeed for many years the early traces of civilization that dot Oaxaca were attributed to Olmecs. Current evidence, however, indicates the Zapotec were probably the first to develop a number of features that came to be characteristic of all subsequent Mesoamerican culture: the first city-states, the first use of a base-twenty numerical system, the first use of a rebus writing system, and the invention of the calendrical system.

The Zapotec call themselves by some variant of the term "The People" (Be'ena'a). The implications of this term are many: The people of this place, The true people, Those who didn't come from another place, Those who have always been here. In fact, both scientific evidence and the origin myths about Zapotecs demonstrate a great antiquity in Oaxaca for the Zapotec and their precursors.The Zapotec, The People, tell that their ancestors emerged from the earth, from caves, and some had turned from trees or jaguars into people. The elite Zapotec who governed, believed they had descended from supernatural beings that lived among the clouds, and that upon death they would return to such status. In fact, the name by which Zapotecs are known today resulted from this belief. In Central Valley Zapotec ‘The Cloud People' is Be'ena' Za'a. The Aztec soldiers and merchants who traded with these people translated their name phonetically into Nahuatl: ‘Tzapotecatl’, and the Spanish conquerors in turn transformed this name into Zapoteca. The Mixtecs, a sister culture of the Zapotecs, also received their Aztec name due to their identity as ‘Cloud People’; Ñusabi in Mixtec proper, but in their case the Nahuatl translation was literal, as ‘Mixtecatl’ translates directly as 'Cloud Person'.

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Mesoamerica Mexican Zapotec Native American Indian history - page 5

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