Pre-Columbian Pottery Group of 4 - Tlatilco, Zapotec, Nayarit & Teotihuacan

Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Tlatilco, Zapotec, Nayarit, and Teotihuacan cultures. A quartet of ancient Mexican earthenware pieces spanning nearly two millennia of Mesoamerican craft. A standing Tlatilco fertility figurine, modeled in the round with full hips and an elaborate coiffure, embodies the Preclassic Valley of Mexico's preoccupation with the female form. Beside it, a small Teotihuacan head bears the broad, stylized features and applique cap of the great highland metropolis. A larger Zapotec head from Oaxaca, its serene visage framed by an ornamented headdress, hints at the modeled urn traditions of Monte Alban. Completing the group, a hand-built Nayarit jar from West Mexico swells with the rounded, utilitarian grace of shaft-tomb ceramics. Together they trace a cross-section of Mexico's ancient ceramic vocabulary, from votive figurine to funerary vessel. The four cultures represented span radically different times and regions of ancient Mexico. Tlatilco, flourishing in the Valley of Mexico during the Early to Middle Preclassic (ca. 1200-800 BCE), is renowned for its solid handmodeled figurines emphasizing fecundity. The Zapotec, centered at Monte Alban in Oaxaca, produced their most celebrated ceramic sculpture between roughly 300 BCE and 700 CE. Teotihuacan, the vast Classic-period city northeast of modern Mexico City, reached its apogee ca. 150-650 CE, mass-producing moldmade heads and figurines. Nayarit, part of the West Mexican shaft-tomb tradition, is best known for ceramics interred with the dead between about 200 BCE and 500 CE. Grouped together, the pieces offer a compact teaching survey of Mesoamerican regional style. Item # 203382

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