In Oaxaca, I indulged in some of the excellent museums that the city has to offer, among them a museum for contemporary art and a museum for painters from Oaxaca, the Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños. The museums were all housed in beautiful old buildings, and some of the exhibitions actually made fantastic use of the architecture, like this one:
On my way to the next museum, I decided to take a quick look into the church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán. The interior decoration is quite stunning: very rich and very golden.
In the former convent attached to Santo Domingo is the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca, a huge museum explaining the history of all the cultures that at some point in time inhabited the state of Oaxaca, from the earliest settlements to the modern age. Unfortunately, I had no idea that the museum would be this big, so I had to rush through the modern history part to at least catch a glimpse of everything before the museum closed. Being located in the former convent, the rooms that made up the museum were in themselves worth seeing:
In the first part, somewhat unrelated to the rest, there was an exhibition of wooden chests used by Oaxaca's nobility. I love this kind of chest, and probably spent too much time admiring them ;-)
The people living in the region of Oaxaca were no Maya, but Zapotecs and Mixtecs. Many aspects of Monte Alban seemed somewhat similar to the Maya, however, for example the 260-day ritual calendar they used that was composed of 20 signs and 13 numerals.
The main Zapotec settlement was called Monte Albán, but it declined around 900 DC, at roughly the same time that many Mayan citites - Tikal, for example - declined. There is no consensus as to what exactly caused the decline, only a handful of theories: inter-city warfare, over-farming, deforestation, drought. Exactly the same theories that are used to explain the Mayan decline - strange, isn't it?
The museum displayed many of the items found in excavations in Monte Albán - there were tombs there that contained hundreds of burial objects such as this one:
In the 1520s, the city of Oaxaca was founded by the Spanish in the middle of a region with indigenous villages. At the beginning, the population of Oaxaca was ridiculously small compared to the number of indigenous inhabitants in the region. Unfortunately, however, the Spanish had superior arms and armor, and they also had strange big animals that they rode upon - a concept entirely unknown in this part of the world. And so history took its course, the Spanish exploited the indigenous population as best they could, and even today indigenous people are often looked down upon as second-class citizens. It is sad indeed what a few hundred years of European technological advantage bought the world, isn't it?
