UNESCO sites in Oaxaca

Mexico, as the home of countlessly diverse cultures and equally diverse plant and animal life, is home to twenty-seven culturally important UNESCO sites, five naturally important sites, and one ‘mixed’ site: the “Ancient Maya City and Protected Tropical Forest of Calakmul” in Campeche. Along with the Mayan City, numerous other sites range from Pre-Hispanic settlements various native societies to Christian monasteries, to the habitat of Mexico’s renowned blue agave plants. Within the state of Oaxaca specifically, there are two of these UNESCO recognized sites, the famous Monte Albán as well as the Prehistoric Caves of Yagul and Milta in the Central Valley of Oaxaca. These two extremely important cultural locations have countless stories to tell about the history of Oaxaca, especially in terms of Pre-Columbian Mexico.

Monte Albán, the more well known of the two UNESCO sites, is a massive city that was inhabited for 1,500 years by Olmecs, Zapotecs, and Mixtecs, cultures which each built upon the structure to create terraces, dams, canals, pyramids, ball game courts, temples, and many other impressive works of architecture. This beautiful construction was built in a fashion which represented symbols often seen in ‘sacred geometry,’ a compliment to the much more angular urban planning seen in Oaxaca de Juarez which was built in the style of Spanish cities. This city is said to be the best archeological sites of the 200 Pre-Columbian archeological sites in Oaxaca due to what it offers in terms of history, each of the societies living within the city having left their own hieroglyphic inscriptions and architecture in a way that allows archeologists to more accurately understand the development and changes in the region that took place over its entire history. With so many culturally important structures in one archeological site, it may be hard to believe that Monte Albán is not yet even fully excavated, with much of the city still undocumented; having discovered so much history in the site already, it is almost certain that archeologists will learn more and more about the ancient peoples of Oaxaca as excavation continues.

The second UNESCO site in Oaxaca is just as interesting and culturally relevant as Monte Albán, and even older. The Prehistoric Caves of Yagul and Mitla can be found in the northern slopes of the Tlacoula Valley in Oaxaca, and are home to rock art and corncob fragments, all of which is a look into the lives of hunter-gatherers who lived there and chronicles the early days as agriculture only began to arise in Mesoamerica. With Mexico being widely seen as one of the three birthplaces of agriculture in the world, the importance of this site in terms of prehistoric anthropology and sociology cannot be overstated. The ability to track mankind’s movement from nomadic lifestyles to more sedentary agricultural societies is an extremely difficult subject to study as this transition began far before the development of writing, and it is due to this that these caves are seen as such an important cultural location by UNESCO.

http://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/mx
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1352
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/415