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The warm afternoon breeze wafts a gentle mist of dust across the floor of the Oaxaca valley and into Oaxaca city, softening the colonial patina of the richly carved, 300-year-old cathedral. The dust is two thousand years old, the dust of Monte Alban, the first major city in the Americas. Now a ghost city, Monte Alban sits perched on a promontory overlooking the modern city which sprawls across the valley floor far below. Two millennia ago, the Zapotec Indians who built Monte Alban trampled part of the hillside into this dust, as they traded in the city's thriving market or gathered to witness important ceremonies. While they went about their daily tasks, Monte Alban's resident priests and astronomers were discussing how to achieve two great objectives: where to construct a new, state-of-the-art astronomical observatory and how best to help civic leaders five hundred kilometers away in central Mexico construct another major urban centre - a city which was to have huge pyramids and which would subsequently be known by us as Teotihuacan, "City of the Gods."
Given the long and rich history of the Oaxaca valley, and the balmy afternoon sunshine, is it any wonder that sitting in the city's main square sipping a cool beer, my thoughts repeatedly turn to what it must have been like in the past and to ponder on possible scenarios for the next millennium, now just around the corner?
The cities of the Oaxaca valley have welcomed tourists for over two thousand years. Among the earliest tourists anywhere in Mexico were those families who accompanied the traders who came to barter their wares in Monte Alban. In recent times, a flood of tourists from Europe, the U.S. and Canada has flowed through Oaxaca's airport before fanning out across the valley in search of the vestiges of the ancient Zapotec and Mixtec cities, seeking to find clues to timeless questions in these long-abandoned sites. A steady stream of modern-day tourists scours city stores for indigenous handicrafts; a few tourists trek to the source of these colorful ceramics and textiles, to one or more of a score of otherwise drab Indian villages, each with its own particular specialty and weekly market.
It is sobering to reflect that historians, in a thousand years time, may well depict the period 1000 to 2000 AD as the "age of massive urbanization." Let's face it, a thousand years ago, large cities were few and far between. Now, on the verge of the next millennium, more people live in urban areas than rural ones. But the opposite trend is already becoming evident in many places, with some urban residents choosing to relocate to suburban and rural areas on the urban fringe, a movement labelled "counter-urbanization" by sociologists.
Oaxaca is a perfect place to reflect on the ebb and flow of cities. Just a few kilometers west of the modern city, Monte Alban is now a ghost city, inhabited only by archaeologists and visited more by international tourists than descendants of the people who originally lived there. The "modern-day" (post sixteenth century) city of Oaxaca, retains its beauty - a jewel displaying all the best facets of colonial art and culture - but is growing rapidly, some would say uncontrollably. To the east of the city, scattered over the floor of the Oaxaca Valley, are small villages, many dating back to pre-Hispanic times, and several formerly more important settlements, which have now sunk into ignominious obscurity. How did these changes occur? What prompted them? Archaeologists are still striving to unravel the clues.
Past and present merge together during even a brief trip to Oaxaca. In the morning, you can journey from...
Next month, we'll take a walk around the site and journey on to Cuilapan, Zaachila and Arrazola.
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