Monte Alban
December 23, 2009

Astrology building
Pregant Woman
Callendar
Site views
Site views


The morning started early for us and Bev did not want to get out of bed but I reminded her that we had agreed to get up early to go see the ruins. We were not to sure that this would be a great site after what we had already seen but we would go and spend the morning. Well what a pleasant surprise.
The museum on site was really quite good and the displays were in English and Spanish as well as an Indian dialect. Then we got a guide who was a native and spoke excellent English and he was 75 years old and climbing these ruins every day. This is a pre Mayan, pre Aztec ruin and has 4 different sets of ruins one on top of the other. It is superbly preserved because it was abandoned before the Spanish came and therefore they did not know it was there so it was not destroyed as many of the sites were.
It was an extensive site laid out facing true north - south in alignment.
Remember that this was an agrarian society and therefore astrological knowledge was of prime importance to them. Their calendar was based on the seasons and extremely accurate.
They had an observatory at the site aligned so that the winter and summer solstice could be recorded. A ball field where a kind of Olympics was held every 52 years. And many pyramids and temples and plazas. Remember that the common people did not live here only the very elite.
Their culture was quite advanced in medicine and performed surgery on the skull, caesarian sections for birth and also abdominal surgery. Their language was written but on stone tablets which have yet to be translated. All this about 2000 BC.
The last culture to inhabit this site was about 500 AD and then it was abandoned for some reason.
It is hard to visualize the entire complex was once covered with plaster and no grass grew here. AH well I know that these photos do not do it justice but I hope that you can see some of the magnificence that we saw here.