Tlatilco

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The site came up out of a brickyard. On the western flats below the highland lakes, where the clay lay thick and good for firing, the diggers of the 1930s cut down through the field and struck the dead — graves laid in the earth more than three thousand years before, packed with whole painted pots, with small clay women, with beads and ornaments of green stone. The clay was wanted for brick, and the brick trade did not stop for the dead; what came up with each cutting of the bank was carried off and sold. A market grew on the spot, the workers offering by hand what the spade turned over, and the buyers came out from the city to pick through it. Among the buyers were the painter and writer Miguel Covarrubias and the muralist Diego Rivera, who competed across the brickyard for the finest pieces and between them drove the prices up. What was being sold, before anyone had excavated a single grave under control, was the funerary furniture of one of the earliest villages of the central highlands — Tlatilco, a name later attached from Nahuatl, glossed as the place where things lie hidden, which is what the brick-diggers had found it to be.

A village by the water

Tlatilco stood on the low western shore of the lake system that filled the floor of the basin, in a country of marsh-edge and reed and seasonal flood, well watered and rich in the things a lakeside people lives on — fish, waterfowl, the eggs and shells of the shallows, and maize on the drier ground behind. The settlement was not a city and never became one. It was a cluster of small villages with their fields and, beside and beneath them, an extensive cemetery, the graves dug among and below the houses in the manner of the early farming towns of the basin. The people were sedentary maize farmers who had crossed over from village life into something more ordered and more unequal, and the whole weight of what is known about them comes from how they buried their dead, because the perishable village itself — pole and thatch and packed earth — left far less behind than the offerings sunk into its floors.

The chronology runs, in round figures, across the Early and Middle phases of the period archaeologists of Mesoamerica call the Formative, or Preclassic. The cemetery’s main use falls in the centuries on either side of about 1200 to 900 BCE, with the village’s apogee — its densest population and its richest graves — in roughly that span, and a longer tail of occupation reaching down toward the middle of the first millennium BCE before the place was overtaken by the rising centers of the basin. This is deep antiquity by the measure of the valley: Tlatilco was a flourishing burying-ground while the great Olmec city of San Lorenzo still stood on its plateau on the Gulf coast, generations before the round pyramid of Cuicuilco rose at the southern edge of the same basin, and the better part of a thousand years before the first platforms were laid at Teotihuacan. It belongs to the floor of the sequence, to the long village world out of which every later highland civilization grew.

From the brickyard to the trench

The looting that opened the site also doomed much of it. Through the first half of the twentieth century the brick-cutting destroyed graves faster than anyone recorded them, and the flood of objects onto the market — fine female figurines, large hollow babies, costumed ballplayers, vessels from the extravagant to the plain, masks, bone tools, obsidian, the flat and cylindrical stamps that printed designs onto cloth and skin — carried no record of which grave any piece had come from, or whether it had come from Tlatilco at all, since the name’s new cachet drew unrelated pieces under its label. Covarrubias, who had seen Olmec-style work surfacing in the brickyard and wanted to know whether it was truly being dug there, turned from buyer to excavator. The first controlled work, in 1942, was carried out with the national antiquities institute, and further seasons followed through the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s under a succession of hands; Román Piña Chán’s study of the mid-twentieth century gathered and published the results of the early field seasons and set Tlatilco firmly into the record as a key Formative site. By the close of the work more than five hundred burials had been documented under control — and far more than that had been destroyed unrecorded before the trenches ever opened.

What controlled excavation recovered was not single objects but whole grave-scenes. The dead were laid out — most often extended, some flexed — and around and upon them their offerings were arranged in deliberate compositions: pots set at the head and feet, figurines stood or laid in clusters, ornaments placed on the body. Reading these intact assemblages, rather than the scattered market pieces, is what allows anything to be said about who these people were and how they ranked one another. The accidental opening of the site by the brick trade is therefore the whole of its early history and the source of its enduring difficulty: the most famous Tlatilco objects in the world’s museums are the looted ones, without provenience, while the secure knowledge comes from the smaller, documented remainder.

The pretty ladies and the figurine world

The signature of Tlatilco is its figurines, and above all the small solid figures of women that early collectors named the pretty ladies. They are modeled by hand from fine clay — no mold, each one made individually — with the features built up from applied fillets and punctations: the eyes pinched or slit, the hair piled into elaborate coiffures and sometimes painted, the body given wide hips and full thighs and a narrow waist. They are small, most of them fitting in the hand, low-fired and finished with red, yellow, and white pigment, much of which has worn away. They are found in numbers, and the bias in where they are found is itself one of the more telling facts about the village: figurines cluster in the graves of children and young adults and fall off sharply for the graves of the old — one infant burial held fourteen of them. Whatever they meant, they were bound up with the young and with the act of burial, household images that went into the ground with those who died before their time.

Around the pretty ladies stands a far stranger company. Tlatilco’s modelers had an evident fascination with the doubled and the anomalous body. There are figures with two heads on one body, and figures with a single head bearing two faces — three eyes across a shared brow, two mouths, two noses — and split masks divided down the center into halves that do not match, one side living and one side fleshless or skull-like. The most economical reading takes these as deliberate images of duality: the pairing of complementary opposites — life and death, day and night, the surface of the earth and what lies under it — that would become one of the deepest and most durable structures of central Mexican religious thought, here given form a thousand years and more before the highland temples that would later organize their cosmos around exactly such paired powers. A separate and narrower proposal reads particular two-faced pieces as faithful records of a rare congenital condition, diprosopus or craniofacial duplication, observed and modeled from life. The two readings are not exclusive; an observed anomaly and a cosmological idea can meet in the same small figure. What is not in doubt is that the duplication is intentional — these are uncommon within a large body of ordinary single-headed figures, made on purpose and charged with meaning rather than botched.

The same repertoire runs into pieces that step beyond the standing figure altogether. There are masked dancers and costumed ballplayers, and there is the celebrated acrobat — a man bent fully backward until his feet arch over and touch his own head, balanced in a posture of extreme contortion, the single most reproduced object from the site. Effigy vessels take the shape of fish, ducks, animals, and human forms; the pottery includes well-made bichrome and polychrome wares, bottles and bowls and the deep-bodied vessels that held the offerings. Taken together the Tlatilco figures are an unusually direct window onto a Formative village’s sense of itself: its women and infants, its dancers and players and acrobats, its preoccupation with the body and with the body’s strange variants.

The Olmec horizon

Threaded through this highland material, on a minority of the burials, is something that plainly came from elsewhere. A part of the Tlatilco assemblage is carved and modeled in the unmistakable style of the Olmec of the distant Gulf lowland: the hollow, large-bodied baby-face figures with their puffy cheeks, downturned snarling mouths, and almond eyes; masks and small carvings with the cleft head and the were-jaguar mouth of the Gulf-coast supernaturals; pottery incised with the hand-paw-wing and other motifs of that iconographic system. These are not the local pretty-lady tradition. They are the central highlands’ end of a long line of contact reaching across the mountains to the country where, at the same centuries, the Olmec were raising San Lorenzo and would soon raise La Venta.

How to read that contact has been argued since the site first drew notice. The earliest and most sweeping view, pressed by Covarrubias, made the Olmec the mother culture of all Mesoamerica and read the Tlatilco material as evidence of Olmec presence or dominion in the highlands. The cooler reading now generally preferred treats the Olmec-style pieces as one register within a basically local ceramic world — a prestigious foreign style adopted and adapted by highland villagers who were in contact with, and exchanging goods and images with, the formative elites of the Gulf coast, not subjects of them. Analysis of the burial pottery has further suggested that Tlatilco is not a single-period site but holds at least two phases: an earlier one in which the highland material runs together with the Olmec horizon, and a later one in which local styles pull away into their own regional course. Either way, the Olmec-style objects at Tlatilco are among the clearest evidence anywhere that the highland basin and the Gulf lowland were knit into a single sphere of exchange and of religious imagery in the centuries around 1200 to 600 BCE, long before any one center in the valley grew large enough to dominate the rest.

What the graves say

The deepest thing Tlatilco has to say is said by who was buried with what. The offerings are not evenly spread. Some graves are plain — a pot or two, a figurine — and some are heaped with goods, and the rich graves carry materials that did not come from the lakeshore at all. There is marine shell, carried up from both coasts; there are ornaments and pendants of jade and other green stones, worked from material that outcrops far to the south; and there are mirrors of polished iron ore, concave disks ground and burnished to a reflecting face from hematite and magnetite and ilmenite, a specialist technology whose nearest sources lie hundreds of kilometers away and which the Olmec elite prized as emblems of rank. To find such things in the graves of a lakeside farming village is to find the far ends of long-distance exchange networks reaching into the basin, and to find them concentrated in a fraction of the burials is to find a society already sorted by rank.

Whose graves hold the wealth settles what kind of society it was. The luxury goods, and the dense clusters of figurines, are not the prerogative of those who lived long enough to earn distinction; they appear with children and infants, with people who died too young to have won anything for themselves. A society that lays imported shell and stone and iron-ore mirrors beside a buried child is a society in which standing is not earned but inherited — passed down within particular families along with the right to be sent into the ground with the proofs of it. This is the mark of a ranked community, a chiefdom in the language of the archaeology of social scale, in which some lineages stood above others by birth and could draw on exchange reaching to both seas to dress their dead. It is among the earliest such arrangements visible in the basin, set down in the floors of an ordinary-looking village by the water — the moment at which the long flat world of the farming hamlets begins, grave by furnished grave, to tilt toward the deep hierarchies that the later highland cities would raise into pyramids and dynasties.

Reading Tlatilco

The site’s literature is shaped, before anything else, by the disaster of its discovery, and the foundational task of every serious treatment has been to separate the documented graves from the provenienceless flood the brickyard put on the market. The early excavations were brought together by Román Piña Chán, whose mid-twentieth-century study built largely on Miguel Covarrubias’s field seasons of the 1940s and remains the point of departure; the broader cultural-historical framing came from Covarrubias himself, whose Indian Art of Mexico and Central America (1957) set Tlatilco within his sweeping and now-qualified case for Olmec priority across Mesoamerica. The chronology of the basin’s Formative villages was put on a firm stratigraphic footing by Paul Tolstoy, whose work at Tlatilco and neighboring sites in the 1960s sorted the sequence into named phases and established that the cemetery spanned more than one period. Recent scholarship has returned to the old collections with new questions: Catharina E. Santasilia’s Tlatilco: People of the Lake re-examines the burials and the social order they encode, and a body of work on ceramic variability and identity has reopened the question of how many communities and how many phases the single label Tlatilco conceals. The figurines, scattered now through the world’s museums, are surveyed for a general audience in the art-historical literature, including Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank’s account of the figurine tradition for Smarthistory, and the story of the brickyard finds and the collectors who haunted it is told in detail by the Tlatilco project documentation.

The frustration that runs under all of it is the gap between fame and knowledge. The most celebrated Tlatilco objects — the finest pretty ladies, the great two-faced women, the acrobat — are largely the ones with no recorded grave behind them, while the secure social picture rests on the documented minority. Yet even that minority is enough to fix the village’s place in the long story of the basin: not a capital, not a temple-city, but the burying-ground of a ranked lakeside people who reached across the mountains to the Gulf for shell and stone and the mirrors of polished ore, and who set those things in the earth beside their children.

The children’s graves are the last word, and they are an unsentimental one. A people who sent infants into the ground dressed in imported wealth and ringed with little clay women were a people for whom one’s place was fixed before one could speak for it — born into a line that already held the shell and the green stone and the right to be buried with them. The pretty ladies smile out of the museum cases as folk art, but the soil they came from records something harder and more exact: the moment in the basin’s history when birth began to decide rank, written not in monuments, which Tlatilco never raised, but in the careful, unequal furnishing of its graves.

→ Related: Olmec · Cuicuilco · Teotihuacan · Zapotec · Xochicalco