Templo H

Templo H rises within Monte Albán, a hilltop archaeological site in southern Mexico and a major centre of the ancient Zapotec civilisation. Its architecture belongs to a wider landscape of temples, tombs, sculpture and painting, where religious ceremonies and important burials shaped the city.

A burial inside the structure held a skeleton wearing a pectoral linked to the Zapotec bat god. About twenty-five pieces of jade and shell form the zoomorphic ornament, whose bat image connects darkness and death with fertility and maize. Zapotec communities associated this deity with rituals that sometimes involved decapitation, while bat imagery appeared across paintings, ceramics and funerary urns. The burial and its ornament reveal how religion, social status and ideas about regeneration came together here.

The pectoral now rests in Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology, but its discovery remains tied to this temple. Look for the detail that gives the find its force: jade and shell assembled into a bat on the chest of the buried person.