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2. Grazing

In addition to cultivation there is also a long tradition of grazing in the Oaxaca Valley. The communities surrounding Monte Alban generally supplement their economies based on agriculture and unskilled labor with goats and cows, as the three hills which make up the Monte Alban complex provide an attractive landscape for such livestock to graze. Herds of cows and goats from at least ten settlements surrounding the archaeological site graze there on a regular basis. Intensive grazing promotes deforestation and consequently erosion, as the livestock consume the young shoots of emerging vegetation. During the mid-1990s two seasons of intensive reforestation intended to revive the landscape and create green barriers to invasion of the archaeological zone have failed due to overgrazing.

In 1994, as part of the Monte Alban Special Project, a sub-project intended to attack the ecological deterioration of the site sought to foster what was dubbed the "Green Wall" (Peralta 1994). The objective was to reforest first the boundary areas and then toward the interior of the zone. The initial phase of the project involved close contact with the surrounding communities including polling, cultivating local influentials and officials, working groups, and community assemblies. In addition to INAH the collaborating agencies were SEDESOL, SEDAF, PROFEPA, Reforma Agraria, and the city of Oaxaca's Bureau of Municipal Ecology. Taking San Juan Chapultepec as an example, this joint effort in May and June, 1994, produced a green barrier stretching more than 1000 yards with approximately 1550 maguey plants, 1280 pines, 400 casuarinas, 150 guajes and 150 guamuchiles (Peralta 1994:16). A report dated 23 July 1994 indicated more than 1000 each of magueys and pines had been destroyed, and in September, 1994, Peralta concluded "it is worth noting 30 percent of the plantings has survived, but the majority have been devoured" (Peralta 1994: 17).

Later that same year, as the Monte Alban Special Project came to a close, another attempt, this time led by SEDESOL, sought to reforest areas of Atzompa and San Martin Mexicapam. This project also sought to work through the local communities and with the assistance of the Mexican army, but the results were the same. Oaxaca's Bureau of Municipal Ecology made an effort to reach agreements with livestock owners to avoid grazing the reforested areas, and subsequently established sanctions for the owners of goats found there, but no method proved effective in controlling further deforestation (Peralta 1994: 14). As the urbanized area expands and grazing lands become more scarce, pressures for using Monte Alban intensify rather than decline.

The area inside Mitla's archaeological zone is different, as being almost completely urbanized grazing is not an issue. But this is not true on the intermediate slopes of the mountains to the north or northeast, where abundant herds of goats and some cattle graze. These areas clearly show accelerated desertification caused at least in part by overgrazing. The slopes are Mitla's communal lands, outside any jurisdiction or oversight by INAH, and the community has not addressed the issue. As flocks may be tended by the children or elderly and represent a means of diversifying household incomes, there would be widespread reluctance to adopt protective strategies without assurance that everyone would be required to support them.

While grazing does not appear to cause direct damage in either archaeological zone, the erosion which seems inevitable does affect archaeological remains. And a lamentable side effect is that grazing appears to contribute to looting. Many of the tombs looted on the west slopes of Monte Alban appear to be the work of goatherders, as in the time they are nominally looking after the goats they may also search for and excavate tombs. Similarly, in Mitla on two occasions archaeologists have had to engage in salvage archaeology on semi-looted tombs reported by "curious" goatherders (Robles 1989 and 1995, unpublished reports, Archives INAH CRO). Thus uncontrolled grazing may have two negative effects on archaeological sites.

3. Exploitation of Forest and Other Resources

Another important agent contributing to the deterioration of Monte Alban's environment has been the indiscriminate extraction of the tree species known as Copal or Copalillo, once found extensively on the hillsides of the site. Since 1986 herders and artisans from communities such as Arrazola and San Martin Tilcajete have based an important part of their economies on craft production of "alebrijes", fanciful, brightly painted wooden sculptures which often take advantage of the natural shapes of these species (Barbash 1993). With success in the national and international markets local sculptors demanded more and more copal, as the shapes and workability of copal made it especially attractive as a raw material. Exploitation of the stands of copal on Monte Alban, Cerro del Gallo and Cerro de Atzompa began in the late 1980s, completely wiping out the species in the area. Efforts to reforest with copal led to cutting of even the smallest shoots for sculptures, and today the artisans must truck in copal from more distant communities. Neither the governmental agencies charged with environmental protection nor the communities themselves have addressed this issue, much less the sculptors who never replanted a single tree to replace the material they cut.

Other species of native vegetation have been heavily exploited, above all those which may be used as firewood. As population concentrations have grown larger and closer to Monte Alban the number of people who seek to collect firewood also grows, and rapid increases in the price of bottled cooking gas makes firewood even more important for many households. Unfortunately no plant inventory of Monte Alban exists, making it impossible to know what other species may be used or overexploited by surrounding populations, but in general exploitation is growing. The observable outcome is that increasingly the zone shows signs of ecological deterioration and erosion affecting archaeological resources.

Although the extraction of mineral resources is minimal, it has had considerable importance in the Cañada, where flagstone is extracted for architectural projects around the city. In 1995 Atzompa's municipal authorities provided large quantitiies of flagstone to the city of Oaxaca for ornamental street paving in the historic district. The flagstone was extracted by heavy machinery, in the process creating a series of terraces quickly appropriated as housing sites by people invading the boundaries of Monte Alban. The municipal authorities of Atzompa and Oaxaca collaborated in facilitating this invasion through the apparent understanding that the flagstone would be removed in such a way as to prepare the site for residential use. Thus resources which make up the setting for one heritage site are removed for the beautification of another heritage site, and in the process expose the first to a double degradation by damaging the natural landscape and contributing to irregular invasion. This led Winter to observe "There is a contradictory policy for the two components of the World Heritage Site, in that it supports the destruction of part of Monte Alban to "improve" the appearance of the city of Oaxaca" (Winter 1996, Archaeology Section Archives, INAH CRO).

Grazing and resource extraction takes place in areas otherwise unused or with natural vegetation, without regard for land tenure or existing deterioration. For example we see that 80 percent of Atzompa's lands within Monte Alban's boundaries may be considered unused, 2/3 of which is either completely deforested or in the process of degradation. For the city of Oaxaca 70 percent of the lands within the boundary are unused, but 80 percent of those lands should be considered degraded. For San Pedro Ixtlahuaca the figures as 65 percent unused with 2/3 degraded, and for Xoxocatlan 80 percent of the lands are unused with about 50 percent degraded. While to the casual observer who thinks of Monte Alban strictly in terms of its Central Plaza the rest of the zone may appear to be an attractive protected area, the reality is that it has been suffering a complex degradation which governments not only appear to be incapable of stopping, but which they sometimes foster.

In 1931 Parsons listed as one of the economic activities of Mitla the sale of house beams cut from its forests (Parsons 1931: plate VII). Sixty-five years later these forests had disappeared, wiped out by overcutting. Ironically most of the large trees found in Mitla today are in house patios or public spaces, places where they are protected from depredation. The only extractive activity still practiced is the mining of pink limestone for foundations, walls, or facades. This resource is exploited on communal lands by municipal authorities in the name of the community, either to be used in public works or sold to individuals. Although the quarry site lies outside the archaeological zone it is on the path to the Mitla Fortress, a massive rock outcropping used by prehispanic residents as a defensive stronghold against raiders and invaders. The ever-expanding quarry creates a major crater as a visual and physical interruption in the connection of the two cultural resources.

In Mitla the local population also long practiced a kind of "archaeological mining", or the intensive appropriation and reuse of materials from old buildings and platforms for new construction. This, while not strictly exploitation of natural resources, in essence treated pre-Columbian buildings as a source of building materials as a readily-accessible alternative to the quarry mentioned above. Its effect was to further damage structures and greatly reduce their volume. Recovering some of these materials, house by house, to reincorporate them in the-Columbian walls, is a challenge which Batres discusses in his reports of work at Mitla at the start of the twentieth century (Batres 1908).