Zapotec Writing - Famsi

Regarding the antimeric pairs from one or more individuals found outside and inside the
tombs, these are most often teeth and the small bones from the hands and feet. Their spatial
distribution suggests that when tombs had to be prepared in order to place a new burial, the larger
and more visible anatomical elements of the previous burials were shuffled and piled up against the
walls of the crypts, and that the small and inconspicuous bones ended up outside the tombs in the
process of sweeping and cleaning the floors of the crypts.
Some tombs have evidence of behaviors that were not necessarily related to interment
rituals. The mortuary program decorating the mausoleum built on top of tomb 6 at Lambityeco
shows personages in a prone position who carry in their hands human femora and wear human
mandibles as bracelets in their upper arms (Figure 3.8; see also Rabin 1970: 4-5; Urcid 2001:
434, fig. 6.15). In order to determine if there had been intentional removal of human bones in
tomb 6, its skeletal content was compared to that of the other tombs from Lambityeco taken as a
group. When comparing the frequency of inventoried anatomical elements with the expected
frequency based on the minimum number of individuals detected in each tomb, a chi-square
analysis generates two important observations (Figure 3.14 and Table 3.1). One of them is that,
in general, the human remains from tomb 6 are poorly represented. Ten of the 14 bone
categories certainly are, especially the long bones since they contribute to a large extent to the
value of X 2 . Only the metatarsals appear “over-represented”. Since the long bones are large
and of compact tissue—which makes their fragmentation and obliteration more difficult--, their
apparent absence in tomb 6 and their graphic representation in the associated mausoleum
suggests that elite domestic groups removed from the crypts certain anatomical elements of their
ancestors in order to use them as symbols to validate their status (Lind and Urcid 1983: 81). The
absence of small bones in the tombs is most likely due to their obliteration as a consequence of
the multiple reentries of the tombs and the constant re-arrangements of their contents.
These observations bear important implications because in some instances, the evidence
used to substantiate the practice of human immolation in the context of funerary rituals is based
on the lack of anatomical elements in some of the articulated burials found in the tombs. Caso,
without benefiting from a detailed anatomical inventory (Rubín de la Borbolla 1933: 190),
interpreted the deposits in tomb 10 from Monte Albán in those terms:
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