A description of the work of Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus and their colleagues in Mexico's Oaxaca Valley where the Zapotecs created one of the world's original civilizations. At its peak 1500 years ago, the Zapotec capital of Monte Alban - with its magnificent temples, tombs, ballcourts and hieroglyphic inscriptions - dominated a society of over 100,000 people with farflung territorial outposts. Yet a millennium earlier Monte Alban had been uninhabited and the valley's population less than one tenth its later size. The authors of the book go back to the beginnings of the settlement in Oaxaca 10,000 years ago to provide the answers to what caused this sudden cultural flowering.