South Platform

At the southern end of the Main Plaza rises a massive stepped foundation, built during the last major rebuilding of Monte Albán. A broad staircase runs up the middle of the façade, and at the top are a courtyard and two temple foundations. People gathering in the plaza could see the ceremonial ascent, but the courtyard itself lay above the shared space. The staircase, courtyard, and stone terraces still preserve the plan of the plaza's southern boundary.

At the foot of the South Platform, carved slabs stand as if ancient builders had left a stone chronicle here to be read. They did otherwise: they walled the old images into the foundation and probably covered them with plaster.

One group of slabs had once made up an independent monument to a ruler whom the museum label calls Thirteen Owl. He sought recognition of his accession to the throne. The carvers showed him seated, with a scepter in his hand; among all the participants, he alone is not bound. Several captives are led to him, each with a name carved on him, while calendar dates and signs of capture stand beside them. For the ruler, the stake was the throne; for the named captives, life. According to one reading of the inscriptions, they were captured in campaigns and then sacrificed at the completion of calendar cycles. This is an epigraphers' reconstruction: Zapotec writing has not yet been fully deciphered.

While Thirteen Owl was alive, the composition displayed his military successes and his right to decide the fate of the defeated. After his death, other inhabitants of Monte Albán dismantled the monument. During the last major expansion of the South Platform, builders assembled for it at least thirty-three carved stones from eight earlier compositions. They placed Thirteen Owl's slabs at the corners as foundation offerings. The images of the former ruler and his captives lost their former purpose: they were turned toward the masonry and hidden beneath the finish.

Above them, they raised a huge stepped base that closes the Main Plaza from the south. A broad staircase led to a courtyard and two temple foundations at the top. People in the plaza could see the ceremonial ascent, but not the old reliefs inside the walls. What was preserved here was not the story of Thirteen Owl, but the stones themselves, incorporated into a new sacred structure.

In nineteen oh two, the state inspector of monuments, Leopoldo Batres, dug trenches at the platform's four corners and extracted eight slabs. He sent several to Mexico City. Reliefs on the previously hidden sides showed that the stones had been turned over and reused repeatedly.

Half a century later, the archaeologist Jorge Acosta tried to return the slabs to the foundation, but he had no precise plan from Batres. He arranged some of the stones according to their outward appearance; Stela Eight, as researchers later established, he placed at the northwest corner instead of the southwest corner. Copies now stand by the staircase. The original with the seated ruler is kept in the local museum, other slabs are in Mexico City, and their ancient places in the masonry remain a matter of reconstruction.