Drawing from field work throughout the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, this paper analyses the building cultures of traditional Mexican domestic architecture. Oaxaca is home to several discrete pre-industrial construction techniques including adobe, rammed earth, wood, and stone. Over time, regions have evolved their own highly distinct home types or material systems. These regional nuances were the product of complex relationships or building cultures which were born of local materials, labour systems, and economies. These relationships began at the broadest scale of environmental relationships with stewardship and harvest of building materials, and extended all the way to the most precise scale, or the building detail. While these homes may appear simple in isolation, when their construction is analysed through technical, anthropological, and socio-political lenses, we begin to understand how integral they were to traditional culture and daily life. These external frameworks help understand that the environment, social dynamics, and technical skills functioned both with and against each other, shaping and being shaped by local systems of labor, technologies, and architectural forms. As these building techniques become less viable today, understanding why their construction made sense in the past helps us understand exactly what is being lost and why.
