Ceramics from Teotenango

Anthropology major Anne Beyens is scanning some of the drawings of ceramics from Teotenango to use in our ceramic type guidebook. Teotenango (see photo) is a large site in the southern part of thToluca Valley.

The first pot shown here is an E-1 tripod bowl, a type whose decoration is similar to the Macana red-on-brown type from Tollan-phase Tula. The second bowl is a Malinalco import (type D-1). These drawings are nice - very clear, good reproduction in black-and-white. They are from:

Tommasi de Magrelli, Wanda
    1978    La cerámica funeraria de Teotenango. Biblioteca Enciclopédica del Estado de México, vol. 61. Estado de México, Toluca.


In 2002, I photographed the Teotenango vessels and recorded attributes, and some day I'll find time to work this material up for publication. Some preliminary information is found in:

Smith, Michael E., and Jennifer Wharton
    2003    Postclassic Funerary Ceramics from the Toluca Valley, Central Mexico. Paper presented at the 2003 Annual Conference, Society for American Archaeology, Milwaukee.

The Teotenango ceramics are from a series of burials in the plazas of the site. The plazas shown in the site photo at the top were filled with burials. The photo on the right is a reconstruction of a burial, in the museum at the site (which is a great museum, well worth a trip). The monumental architecture was probably built during the Epiclassic period, then perhaps abandoned during the Early Postclassic (this isn't clear), and then during the Middle/Late Postclassic period, people put in all these burials. The ceramics are very similar to Calixtlahuaca, although with different quantities (e.g., red-on-white, our grouop D, is common at Teotenango but rare at Calixtlahuaca).