Archaeologists in Mexico have actually found a 1,400-year-old burial place from the Zapotec culture that includes unspoiled information, consisting of a sculpture of a wide-eyed owl with a guy in its beak, various colored murals and calendrical carvings.

Authorities discovered the burial place after acting on a confidential report of robbery at the website. Their examination exposed the “most significant archaeological discovery in a decade in Mexico,” Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, revealed at a Jan. 23 press conference in Spanish.

The burial place was found in San Pablo Huitzo, a town in Oaxaca in southern Mexico, in 2025. It dates to about A.D. 600, when the Indigenous Zapotecs– likewise referred to as the “Cloud People” — grew in the location. The Zapotec civilization was developed around 700 B.C. and collapsed due to the Spanish conquest in 1521. Hundreds of thousands of Zapotec-speaking individuals still reside in Mexico todayAt the entryway to the freshly revealed burial place, archaeologists discovered a big sculpted owl whose beak opens to expose the painted face of a Zapotec lord. In ancient Zapotec culture, the owl represented death and power, recommending it kept in its mouth a picture of the forefather the burial place honors, according to an equated declaration from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

Inside the burial place, a limit in between 2 chambers boasts an elaborately sculpted entrance. The top has a horizontal beam made from stone pieces inscribed with “calendrical names” — a calling system in which divine beings and essential individuals were offered a particular sign related to their birth date. Flanking the entrance were etched figures of a male and a lady, possibly representing forefathers buried in the burial place or guardians of the palace, according to the INAH declaration.

Inside the burial place, there is a chamber flanked by sculpted male and female figures. (Image credit: Luis Gerardo Peña Torres/INAH)The walls of the burial chamber protected various colored murals in white, green, red and blue. They illustrate a funeral procession of individuals bring bags of “copal,” a tree resin that was burned as incense throughout events in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.

The extremely embellished burial place is an “exceptional discovery due to its level of preservation and what it reveals about Zapotec culture: its social organization, its funerary rituals, and its worldview, preserved in its architecture and mural paintings,” Claudia Curiel de IcazaMexico’s secretary of culture, stated in the declaration.