Location, location, location—it’s the first rule of real estate. For a long time, it’s been widely assumed that being close to resources drives settlement patterns, with cities generally founded near water and fertile land for growing crops. But a new paper by a husband-and-wife archaeological team questions that idea, using the example of an ancient city in what’s now southern Mexico. The researchers argue that Monte Albán, the largest city in its region for more than a thousand years, wasn’t situated near especially good farmland. But what it did have from the city’s foundation was a defendable hilltop location and a more collective form of government that attracted people both to the settlement and its surrounding area.1

Monte Albán lies in the Valley of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. It was founded in 500 BC, grew rapidly, and endured as the region’s main metropolis for 1,300 years, longer than most, if not all, other prehispanic Mesoamerican cities. “We’ve been working in the Oaxaca Valley for 40 years, and we and our colleagues have wondered what drew so many people to move to Monte Albán and its surrounding area, and what allowed the city to sustain itself for so long,” says Gary Feinman, the Field Museum’s MacArthur curator of anthropology and co-author of the study. “Over the years, a few competing ideas have been advanced.”2

• 1. “We wanted to understand why Monte Albán was founded where it was,” says Linda Nicholas, the first author of the study in Frontiers in Political Science and an adjunct curator at the Field Museum. 
• 2. One hypothesis to explain the rapid growth at Monte Albán is coercion—the idea that powerful rulers forced people to move there. Another possible explanation was that people went there because the land was good for farming. To examine the validity of these possible explanations, Nicholas and Feinman went back over decades of research covering both Monte Albán and the surrounding Valley of Oaxaca. To evaluate the argument that Monte Albán attracted people because of the quality of its farmland, the researchers drew on studies of modern land use in the valley to map out different land classes based on the availability and permanence of water, the most important factor for crop yields in the valley. Good, well-watered land was patchily distributed across the valley so that some areas had much higher potential yields than others. While pre-Monte Albán settlements were more heavily concentrated in the most productive parts of the valley, Monte Albán was not. Land quality was less a factor in settlement decisions at the time of Monte Albán’s foundation, both for the city and nearby settlements.