A personal connection
For Ramón Celis, the project carries personal significance. His mother’s family is from Tehuantepec, just 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Guiengola, and childhood stories about the site inspired his pursuit of archaeology.
“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,” he says.
These findings, which were recently published in Ancient Mesoamerica, mark the start of a broader examination of Zapotec society.