Tlatilco Culture: Village Figurines of the Valley of Mexico

Tlatilco was a farming village on the western shore of ancient Lake Texcoco, in the Valley of Mexico, that flourished from around 1200 BC. It is famous for hundreds of burials filled with pottery and for small, lively clay figurines, especially the so-called “pretty ladies”. Together they give one of the clearest pictures of village life in central Mexico more than a thousand years before Teotihuacan and the Aztecs.

Discovery by brickmakers

Tlatilco, a Nahuatl name often translated as “place where things are hidden”, lies today within the suburbs of Naucalpan, north-west of Mexico City. In the 1930s local brickmakers digging clay began to find pots and figurines in the soil. Many objects were sold to collectors before any scientific record was made.

The Mexican artist and scholar Miguel Covarrubias was among the first to recognise the importance of the finds and to publicise their artistic quality. Official excavations followed in several seasons during the 1940s, and a later campaign in the 1960s, led by the physical anthropologist Arturo Romano Pacheco, recovered many more graves. In total, archaeologists have documented around 500 burials, although many more were probably destroyed by the clay pits.

A village beside the lake

Tlatilco was not a city. It was a large village of farmers who lived in simple houses of wattle and daub, close to the lake shore and to fresh springs and streams. The lake supplied fish, waterfowl and reeds, while the surrounding land was good for maize, beans and squash.

Life in the Valley of Mexico at this time was organised in villages of a few hundred to perhaps a thousand or more people. Tlatilco was one of the largest and richest of them, alongside sites such as Tlapacoya on the eastern side of the lake. Differences in grave goods suggest that some families had more status and wealth than others, an early sign of social ranking.

The burials

The dead were buried in pits within the settlement, often near houses and in refuse areas, rather than in separate cemeteries. Most lay extended on their backs, though flexed burials also occur. Many were accompanied by offerings: pottery bowls and bottles, figurines, obsidian blades, tools of bone and stone, and occasionally jade or other greenstone.

Some graves were notably richer than others. Women’s burials in particular sometimes contain many vessels and figurines, which has led scholars to suggest that women held important roles in the household economy, ritual or both. The skeletons also show cultural practices such as deliberate head shaping in infancy and filing of the teeth, customs that continued in Mesoamerica for many centuries.

Figurines and pottery

Tlatilco’s clay figurines are its best-known legacy. Most are small, solid and hand-modelled, with features added in pellets and strips of clay. The most common type shows young women with broad hips, short arms and elaborate hairstyles or headdresses. Others show musicians, dancers, ball players wearing protective belts, mothers holding children, and figures with masks.

Some pieces suggest religious ideas about duality. A few figurines have two heads on one body, or a single face with three eyes shared between two profiles. A well-known clay mask from Tlatilco is divided down the middle, one half a living face and the other a skull, often interpreted as an image of life and death.

The pottery is equally varied: bottles shaped like animals and plants, bowls with incised designs, and stirrup-spout vessels. One of the most admired objects, the “Acrobat”, is a vessel in the form of a contortionist bending his legs over his shoulders. It is now displayed in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

Links with the Olmec world

A minority of Tlatilco objects carry motifs typical of the Olmec civilization of the Gulf Coast: baby-faced figurines, designs related to the jaguar and to the “flame eyebrow”, and vessels with incised symbols. Covarrubias and others once suggested that Olmec people had settled at Tlatilco.

Most archaeologists now see a more mixed picture. Tlatilco was a local community with its own traditions, which took part in long-distance networks that exchanged goods such as obsidian, greenstone and fine pottery. Ideas and symbols travelled along the same routes, linking villages in the highlands with lowland centres such as San Lorenzo and, later, La Venta.

What Tlatilco tells us

Because so few buildings survive, Tlatilco’s evidence comes mainly from graves. The figurines and offerings reveal what people wore, how they styled their hair, which musical instruments they played and how they honoured the dead. The ball-player figurines show that the Mesoamerican ball game was already known in the highlands.

The site also illustrates a problem common in archaeology. Much of Tlatilco was dug up for brick clay or looted, and many “Tlatilco-style” pieces in collections lack a recorded findspot. Some figurines on the art market are modern fakes, which makes the excavated material especially valuable.

Timeline

• c. 1200 BC: Tlatilco is an established village near the shore of Lake Texcoco.
• c. 1200–700 BC: Main period of the excavated burials and figurines.
• c. 1000–800 BC: Olmec-style motifs appear on some pottery and figurines.
• 1930s: Brickmakers begin finding ancient objects in local clay pits.
• 1940s: Formal excavations; Miguel Covarrubias publicises the finds.
• 1960s: New excavations led by Arturo Romano Pacheco recover many more burials.

Why it matters

Tlatilco shows that the Valley of Mexico, later home to Teotihuacan and the Aztec capital, already had prosperous, ranked village societies more than 3,000 years ago. Its figurines are among the most expressive early art of the Americas and a key window on ordinary people of the Formative period.