Mitla

Palace with stone mosaics and original paint

The famous wall mosaics

Grupo de las Columnas

Grupo de la Iglesia, with Spanish Colonial church built on top of Mixtec/Zapotec ruins.

Mitla is the name commonly given to an archaeological site located in the town of San Pablo Villa de Mitla in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It is famous for its pre-Columbian Mesoamerican buildings.

Pre-Columbian Mitla

While archaeological evidence shows that Mitla was occupied by 500 BC, the earliest construction dates to only about 200 AD. Construction of pre-Columbian style buildings continued up until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the 1520s. The town has been continually occupied ever since; part of the more recent town was built over pre-Hispanic Mitla, but some groups of old elite palace complexes remained. At its height Mitla had a population of approximately 10,000 people.

The earliest structures (i.e., the Late Formative and Early Classic periods) at Mitla are Zapotec; the remainder are Postclassic in date, constructed during the Mixtec occupation of the site, but often displaying an interesting mix of Zapotec and Mixtec styles. Five main groups of buildings remain including the Grupo de las Columnas in the east of the site which is a former palace. It consists of three large rooms set around tombs and a courtyard. The palace walls are decorated with distinctive geometric mosaics that characterize Mitla's buildings. Each frieze consists of up to 100,000 separate pieces of cut stone. One of the rooms, known as the Salon de las Columnas, houses six monolithic pillars that once supported the roof. To the north is the Grupo de Iglesia centered around the colonial Catholic church. The pre-Columbian buildings that survived its construction are of similar design to those in the Grupo de las Columnas, but on a smaller scale. They still retain traces of paintwork and some artifacts which have been found at the site are displayed in the Museo Frisell de Arte Zapeteco Mitla in the centre of the town which closed temporarily for renovation in 2001.

In 1494 the Aztecs conquered Mitla and sacked the city. Once the Spanish took over, they found their efforts to convert locals to Catholicism thwarted by competition from native beliefs, manifesting themselves at ancient buildings such as those at Mitla. To combat the problem, the Spanish built a new church on top of the footprint of a former temple , scavenging the original temple for building materials.

A number of Spanish writers of the colonial era remark on the well built pre-Hispanic buildings here. Alexander von Humboldt published a description of the site in 1810. Some excavations and repair of buildings was done under the direction of Leopoldo Batres in 1901. The Mexican government made further excavations of the site in the mid 1930s and the early 1960s.

Present day Mitla

The official name of the present-day town is San Pablo Villa de Mitla. With a population of just over 7,000 people in 1990, Mitla is located about 45 km (some 26 miles) by road southeast of the state capital of Oaxaca, Oaxaca. The main group of pre-Hispanic buildings is at the north end of town. Today, the town of Mitla is a popular tourism destination for visitors to Oaxaca and has a small museum and hosts a small outdoor market on Saturdays. Most of the townspeople speak a variant of the Zapotec language ( ISO 639.-3[1] code zaw.).

In Mitla and the surrounding towns are "palenques", small producers of mezcal where they produce the drink by hand from the heart of the agave plant. 5 km from Mitla is a small town called Matatlán, which, due to the number of palenques, is called the "mezcal capital of the world".^[1]

Additional Images of Mitla

Walls with the distinct mosaics	Detail of interior "mosaic" reveals original stucco	Another palace within Mitla
Closeup view of stone mosaic-work at Mitla. This was an inspiration for similar mosaics by Frank Lloyd Wright	Wall detail, stone mosaics, Mitla	Patio Norte, Mitla

References

1. ^ Quintanar Hinojosa, Beatriz (August 2007). "Ciudad de Oaxaca". Guía México Desconocido: Oaxaca 137. http://www.mexicodesconocido.com.mx. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Mitla

• Mitla virtual tour on geocities.com
• The Grecas of Mitla story and photos on ourmexico.com
• The DeLanges visit Mitla, with lots of photos

Coordinates: 16°55′N 96°24′W / 16.917°N 96.4°W / 16.917; -96.4