Monte Alban — Orr Wines

Look I love a ruin. I’m from California and now Washington (after living here for 17 years can I say that? just waiting for my Seattleites to fire me for this…) the oldest thing we have is Fenton’s Ice Creamery or the first Starbucks. So I was super excited to check out Monte Alban, a Zapotec city from 500 BC constructed on the top of a 6000 ft elevation “hill” about 6 miles away from what is now Oaxaca City.

Some background - ya girl studied Biochemistry in school which has served her well running an enology lab. But I never learned anything about pre-Colombian Mezoamerican civilizations (among other things). Last month I went to the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, which I wrote about in this here blog. The museum is wholly overwhelming. It’s huge and every single piece in the collection is drop dead amazing. I have a lot to learn about history in general, Mexican history specifically, and visiting these places in person and sharing my trips on the blog is a way to educate myself a little bit.

Anyhow, in an effort to have some direction to my visit to the Anthropology Museum, I tried to focus on the Mexico City sourced artifacts (Tenochtitlan) even though there is a whole part of the museum on Zapotec culture and Monte Alban which I missed out on. You guys, there’s too much to see in that museum. Point being when I was walkin around Monte Alban I was thankful to have internet access on my phone to read the wikipedia entry explaining what I was looking at.

So what was I lookin at?

Monte Alban was one of the earliest cities in Mesoamerica which I just learned is the historic area from central Mexico down to Nicaragua and northern Costa Rica. Around 500 BC, the Zapotec civilization in Oaxaca independently developed language, agriculture, calendars and record keeping, architecture, commerce, warfare and… bad news … religious ritual and human sacrifice.

My very limited understanding is that the agriculture took place in the fertile valleys below the mountain top site of Monte Alban. The city included a fortress, astrological observatory, public civic space for cultural ceremonies including human sacrifice and it had a really awesome basketball court.

Some practical details if you go - we took a taxi to Monte Alban from Oaxaca City and when we were ready to leave the ruins we were able to jump into a taxi that was dropping other visitors off. I’m working on another blog post about the art and artisanal workshops we visited - hasta al rato.