The Mixtec peoples were among the major original developers of Mesoamerican civilization. Centuries before the Spanish Conquest, they formed literate urban states and maintained a uniquely innovative technology and a flourishing economy. Today, thousands of Mixtecs still live in Oaxaca, in present-day southern Mexico, and thousands more have migrated to locations throughout Mexico, the United States, and Canada. In this comprehensive survey, Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkansky--both preeminent scholars of Mixtec civilization--synthesize a wealth of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data to trace the emergence and evolution of Mixtec civilization from the time of earliest human occupation to the present.
The Mixtec region has been the focus of much recent archaeological and ethnohistorical activity. In this volume, Spores and Balkansky incorporate the latest available research to show that the Mixtecs, along with their neighbors the Valley and Sierra Zapotec, constitute one of the world's most impressive civilizations, antecedent to--and equivalent to--those of the better-known Maya and Aztec. Employing what they refer to as a "convergent methodology," the authors combine techniques and results of archaeology, ethnohistory, linguistics, biological anthropology, ethnology, and participant observation to offer abundant new insights on the Mixtecs' multiple transformations over three millennia.

The Mixtec peoples were among the major original developers of Mesoamerican civilization. Centuries before the Spanish Conquest, they formed literate urban states and maintained a uniquely innovative technology and a flourishing economy. Today, thousands of Mixtecs still live in Oaxaca, in present-day southern Mexico, and thousands more have migrated to locations throughout Mexico, the United States, and Canada. In this comprehensive survey, Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkansky - both preeminent scholars of Mixtec civilization - synthesize a wealth of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data to trace the emergence and evolution of Mixtec civilization from the time of earliest human occupation to the present. The Mixtec region has been the focus of much recent archaeological and ethnohistorical activity. In this volume, Spores and Balkansky incorporate the latest available research to show that the Mixtecs, along with their neighbors the Valley and Sierra Zapotec, constitute one of the world's most impressive civilizations, antecedent to - and equivalent to - those of the better-known Maya and Aztec. Employing what they refer to as a 'convergent methodology,' the authors combine techniques and results of archaeology, ethnohistory, linguistics, biological anthropology, ethnology, and participant observation to offer abundant new insights on the Mixtecs' multiple transformations over three millennia.

Combining older findings with new data on 1,000 previously undescribed archaeological sites, this book presents the cultural evolution of the Mixteca Alta in an up-to-date chronological framework. The nuu - the kingdoms of the famous Mixtec codices - are traced back through the Post-Classic and Classic periods to their beginnings in the first states of the Terminal Formative, revealing their origin, evolution, and persistence through two cycles of growth and collapse. Challenging assumptions that the Mixtec were peripheral to better-known people such as the Aztecs or Maya, the book asserts that the nuu were a major demographic and economic power in their own right. Older explanations of multiregional or macroregional systems often portrayed civilisations as rising in a cradle or hearth and spreading outward. New macroregional studies show that civilisations are products of more complex interactions between regions, in which peripheries are not simply shaped by cores but by their interactions with multiple societies at varying distances from major centres. This book is a significant contribution to this emerging area of archaeological research.