Building J (Observatory) — Monte Albán: Scholarly Article and Original High Resolution Field Photography

Comprehensive scholarly documentation of Building J (the Observatory) at Monte Albán, Oaxaca, Mexico — the only structure at the site deliberately rotated off the Main Plaza's cardinal grid. This record contains the full MAPSA article and original 4K field photography produced on site by the Monte Albán Heritage Center research team. The article covers Building J's construction phases (Monte Albán Periods I–II, c. 500 BCE–200 CE), the contested interpretations of its function — astronomical observatory, calendrical instrument, conquest monument — and the iconographic corpus of approximately fifty carved slabs bearing place-glyphs that may constitute one of the earliest systematic records of political expansion in Mesoamerica. Full scholarly citations are included throughout. The photography set provides high-resolution original field documentation of the structure, its carved conquest slabs, and its spatial relationship to the surrounding Main Plaza architecture. All images were captured on site in Oaxaca by the MAHC field team. Each photograph retains full EXIF metadata including GIS coordinates, enabling precise geospatial referencing of every documented element. The photography set of the Conquest Slabs is provided in both camera-original JPEG and RAW formats to support archival preservation and independent analysis. This is one of 22 structures documented in the MAPSA (Monte Albán Professional Source Archive) institutional teaching platform. The live article and institutional access portal are available at https://montealbanoaxaca.com/wiki Published by the Monte Albán Heritage Center (MAHC) — Oaxaca, Mexico.