Female Figure 12th–9th century Tlatilco This solid, hand-modeled ceramic figurine is made of reddish tan clay and painted with a red pigment. The wide hips, bare torso, and hemmed skirt indicate the figure is female, and the incisions on the posterior of the head represent a traditionally feminine coiffure. The small of the back is concave and the belly protrudes in profile. A central vertical pendant adorns the back of the some three millennia ago in the Valley of Mexico, this figurine belongs to a group of ceramic effigies known collectively as the Tlatilco "pretty ladies.

Female Figure 12th–9th century Tlatilco This solid, hand-modeled ceramic figurine is made of reddish tan clay and painted with a red pigment. The wide hips, bare torso, and hemmed skirt indicate the figure is female, and the incisions on the posterior of the head represent a traditionally feminine coiffure. The small of the back is concave and the belly protrudes in profile. A central vertical pendant adorns the back of the some three millennia ago in the Valley of Mexico, this figurine belongs to a group of ceramic effigies known collectively as the Tlatilco "pretty ladies." Depicting females with large heads, small waists, and prominent hips, these handheld sculptures present a fairly standardized body type and are typically fired to red, buff, or brown tones. As the popular embodiments of an ideal feminine form, the Tlatilco "pretty ladies" are part of a centuries-long tradition in which eccentricities and religious imagery predominate. Featuring hunchbacks, dwarfs, contorted acrobats, two-headed women, and conjoined twins, the corpus of Tlatilco figurines encompasses the full gamut of human generations, Tlatilco was a small farming community located on the fringes of modern-day Mexico City. By the early twentieth century, however, the fields of clay surrounding Tlatilco had become important sites of brick production utilized in the construction and rapid expansion of the nearby Federal District. In 1936, brick workers began unearthing troves of ceramic figurines—later termed "pretty ladies"—that closely resembled others recently discovered by the archaeologist George C. Vaillant (1930). Using what little contextual information he had available to him, Vaillant accurately attributed these works to the Early to Middle Preclassic-period Zacatenco culture (ca. 1500–600 )--an umbrella term which also included the people of in the 1940s, archaeologists began to study the site of Tlatilco in earnest.

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