Teuchitlán culture

The Teuchitlán culture was one of several related cultures in West Mexico during the Late Formative to Classic period (350 BCE to 450/500 CE).Christopher S. Beekman and Robert B. Pickering (2016). Introduction: An Historical Overview of Shaft Tomb Archaeology in Western Mexico. In Shaft Tombs and Figures in West Mexican Society: A Reassessment edited by Christopher S. Beekman and Robert B. Pickering, pp. 1-21. Gilcrease Museum/Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art. Situated in the Tequila Valleys of Jalisco, the Teuchitlán culture shared in the tradition of burying some of their dead in shaft and chamber tombs. Archaeological work from the past few decades has demonstrated that West Mexico was not occupied by one homogeneous culture, historically referred to as the shaft tomb tradition, that stretched from Nayarit, Jalisco, and Colima. Instead, West Mexico was composed of multiple cultures with several distinct commonalities.

The Teuchitlán culture is an archaeologically defined culture named after the town of Teuchitlán where the largest Teuchitlán culture site, Los Guachimontones, is located.Phil C. Weigand (1989). Architecture and Settlement Patterns Within the Western Mesoamerican Formative Tradition. In El Preclásico o Formativo: Avances y perspectivas edited by Martha Carmona Marcías, pp. 39-64. Museo Nacional de Antropología, INAH, México.Phil C. Weigand (1990). The Teuchitlán Tradition of Western Mesoamerica. In La época clásica: nuevos hallazgos, nuevas ideas edited by Amalia Cardós de Méndez, pp. 25-54. Museo Nacional de Antropología.Phil C. Weigand (1993). Evolución de una civilización prehispánica: arqueología de Jalisco, Nayarit y Zacatecas. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora, México.Phil C. Weigand (1998). Archaeology in the Occidente of Mexico: Architecture and Settlements Patterns of the Teuchitlán Tradition of West-Central Jalisco. Unpublished manuscript.Phil C. Weigand (2007). States in prehispanic western Mesoamerica. In The Political Economy of Ancient Mesoamerica: Transformations during the Formative and Classic Periods, edited by Vernon L. Scarborough, pp. 101-113. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Phil C. Weigand and Christopher S. Beekman (1998). The Teuchitlán Tradition: Rise of a Statelike Society. In Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past edited by Richard Townsend, pp. 35-51. Art Institute of Chicago.Phil C. Weigand, Christopher S. Beekman, and Rodrigo Esparza (2008). Tradición Teuchitlán. El Colegio de Michoacan, Zamora, México. Los Guachimontones is one of several dozen sites in the region, but is most notable for the number and size of its ceremonial buildings. Like many other Mesoamerican cultures, the Teuchitlán culture's writing system did not survive the ravages of time and has not been recovered in the archaeological record, although scholars have found evidence for the existence of scribes at the nearby site of Huitzilapa. Archaeologists do not know what they may have called themselves or what language they may have spoken.Christopher S. Beekman (2019). El Grillo: The Reestablishment of Community and Identify in Far Western Mexico. In Migrations in Late Mesoamerica, edited by Christopher S. Beekman, pp. 109-147. University Press of Florida. The toponym for the town of Teuchitlán dates to the Late Postclassic/Conquest period and could have its origins in one of several Nahuatl speaking migrations to the region after 500 CE.Christopher S. Beekman and Alexander F. Christensen (2003). Controlling for Doubt and Uncertainty Through Multiple Lines of Evidence: A New Look at the Mesoamerican Nahua Migrations. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 10(2): 111-164.Christopher S. Beekman and Alexander F. Christensen (2011). Power, Agency, and Identity Migration and Aftermath in the Mezquital Area of North-Central Mexico. In Rethinking Anthropological Perspectives on Migration edited by Graciela S. Cabana and Jeffery J. Clark, pp. 147-174. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

As with other West Mexican cultures during this period, the Teuchitlán culture buried some, but not all, of their dead in shaft and chamber tombs dug into the earth.Christopher S. Beekman (2016). Who did the Western Mexican Figures Portray? The Correlation Between Figures and Their Contexts. In Shaft Tombs and Figures in West Mexican Society: A Reassessment edited by Christopher S. Beekman and Robert B. Pickering, pp. 97-108. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma. The deceased were interred in these chambers and mortuary goods such as ceramic vessels, hollow and solid ceramic figures, shell jewelry, conch shells, jadeite, quartz, ground stone, and paper were placed within.Jorge Ramos de la Vega and M. Lorenza López Mestas Camberos (1996). Datos preliminares sobre el descubrimiento de una tumba de tiro en el sitio de Huitzilapa, Jalisco. Ancient Mesoamerica 7(1): 121-134.Lorenza López Mestas Camberos and Jorge Ramos de la Vega (2006). Some Interpretations of the Huitzilapa Shaft Tomb. Ancient Mesoamerica 18: 271-281.

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History

Archaeologists still poorly understand the origins and development of the Teuchitlán culture. No Early or Middle Formative sites in the Tequila Valleys have been excavated yet. However, the nearby Early Formative site of El Opeño, MichoacanJosé Arturo Oliveros Morales (2004). Hacedores de tumbas en El Opeño, Jaconá, Michoacán. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora, México.José Arturo Oliveros Morales (2006). El Opeño: Un antiguo cementerio en el occidente mesoamericano. Ancient Mesoamerica 17(2): 251-258.Eduardo Noguera (1942). Exploraciones en El Opeño, Michoacán. Memorias XXVII(1): 574-586.Eduardo Noguera (1971). Nuevas exploraciones en “El Opeño”, Michoacán. Anales de Antropología, vol. 8. 83-100. and somewhat more distantly located Middle Formative site of Mascota, JaliscoJoseph B. Mountjoy (2006). Excavation of two Middle Formative Cemeteries in the Mascota Valley of Jalisco, México. Report submitted to the Foundation for Ancient Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. Electronic document, https://www.famsi.org/reports/03009/03009Mountjoy01.pdf suggest a long continuity of shaft and chamber use in West Mexico. Phil Weigand documented several Middle Formative mounds in the Tequila Valleys in the 1970s and 1980s. These large, low mounds supposedly contained burials that looters had robbed in the past. However, Weigand never published more than some plan maps and descriptions of these mounds.

During the Late Formative period, the Tequila Valleys experienced a surge in population density resulting in the proliferation of surface and subsurface architecture. The sub-surface architecture, in the form of shaft and chamber tombs, is more familiar to archaeologists and the public. This is a result of the rampant looting of tombs starting in the 19th century and continuing until the 1970s, though some looting continues to a lesser extent. Looters focused on shaft and chamber tombs to retrieve the hollow and solid ceramic figures sometimes placed within as mortuary offerings to the deceased. These ceramic figures were sold on the art market to collectors and museums in Mexico and abroad. Painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were frequent collectors of ceramic figures from West Mexico, often incorporating them into their works such as Diego Rivera’s “La Civilización Tarasca” (1950). Other notable collectors include Vincent Price whose collection Kahlúa used for advertisements in the 1960s.Judy Sund (2000). Beyond the grave: The twentieth-century afterlife of west Mexican burial effigies. The Art Bulletin 82(4): 734-767. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Gilcrease Museum also have extensive West Mexican collections.

One of the defining features of the Teuchitlán culture is the construction and use of circular temples called guachimontones. These buildings consist of several architectural features: a basal circular platform that acts as a patio, a ring platform called a banquette constructed on top of the patio platform, an even number of quadrangular platforms constructed on top of the banquette, and a stepped altar located in the center of the patio.Phil C. Weigand (1996). The Architecture of the Teuchitlán Tradition of the Occidente of Mesoamerica. Ancient Mesoamerica 7(1): 91-101. Guachimontones are most heavily concentrated in the Tequila Valleys, but examples are found outside of the cultural boundaries of the Teuchitlán culture. Guachimontones can be found near Comala, Colima,María de los Ángeles Olay Barrientos and Ligia Sofia Sánchez Morton (2015). La Tradición Teuchitlán en Colima, notas para una discusión. Revista Occidente. La Gloria, Guanajuato,Efraín Cárdenas García (1999). El Bajío en el clásico: análisis regional y organización política. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora, México. and Bolaños, Jalisco.Maria Teresa Cabrero Garcia (1989). Civilización en el norte de México: Arqueología de la cañada del Rio Bolaños (Zacatecas y Jalisco). Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México City.María Teresa Cabrero García (1991). Cultura arqueológica de Bolaños (Zacatecas y Jalisco): Una frontera cultura. Ancient Mesoamerica 2(2): 193-203.

Weigand had proposed that the construction of guachimontones followed on the construction of shaft and chamber tombs. The shift from sub-surface to surface architecture was a shift in how power transferred from the association with the dead to power held by the living. However, this hypothesis no longer holds up to scrutiny.Christopher S. Beekman (2016). Settlement Patterns and Excavations: Contexts of Tombs and Figures in Central Jalisco. In Shaft Tombs and Figures in West Mexican Society: A Reassessment edited by Christopher S. Beekman and Robert B. Pickering, pp. 85-96. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Excavations at the site of Los Guachimontones place the construction date of the largest guachimonton in the Tequila Valleys, Circle 1, between 160 and 60 BCE.Christopher S. Beekman (2018). La secuencia cronológica temprana en Los Guachimontones. In Nuevos enfoques en la arqueología de la región de Tequila: Memoria de la Primera Catedra Phil C. Weigand, edited by Joshua D. Englehardt and Verenice Y. Heredia Espinoza, pp. 83-127. Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora, Michoacán, México. The construction of Circle 1 predates the monumental tomb at El ArenalStanley Long (1966). Archaeology of the Municipio of Etzatlán, Jalisco. Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles and the elaborate tomb at Huitzilapa.

Recently, Beekman proposed a different explanation for the relationship between guachimontones and shaft and chamber tombs. Beekman argues that around Los Guachimontones, cultural rules and norms were most heavily enforced among the population with power being shared relatively equally between ruling elite lineages. As one moves away from Los Guachimontones, ruling elites that managed a smaller population and site, were able to exert a greater degree of control. This allowed elites to invest more heavily in the construction of tombs that promoted their lineage than in public architecture used by other elites and the community.

Characteristics

Shaft and Chamber Tombs