Miniature Tlatilco Two-Headed Torso, Grave Offering

Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Tlatilco, ca. 1150–550 BCE. A miniature solid ceramic torso crowned with two heads, each turned outward from a single shared neck and body. The faces are built up from applied fillets: slit coffee bean eyes, pinched noses, open mouths, and small button ears, while the coiffures are incised with dense combed striations above a banded fillet. Below, the female torso carries small rounded breasts and tapering upper arms. Red-orange pigment survives across the hair, shoulders, and body. Duality figures of this kind are among the rarest products of the Tlatilco workshops of the Valley of Mexico, and were likely deposited as grave offerings, perhaps expressing twinned or dual-natured being rather than portraiture. Size: 2.25" W x 2.25" H (5.7 cm W x 5.7 cm H).

Tlatilco, a village site on the western shore of the ancient lake system of the Valley of Mexico, produced thousands of handmodeled figurines recovered largely from burials beneath house floors, excavated from the 1940s onward as brickyard quarrying exposed the cemetery. The overwhelming majority depict women, and a small but celebrated subset departs from the norm: figures with two heads, two faces on one head, or a single face split between living and skeletal halves. Scholars have read these as expressions of duality, an idea with deep roots in later Mesoamerican thought, though shamanic transformation and the commemoration of conjoined births have both been proposed. Whichever reading holds, the two-headed type is scarce, and its appearance in the Middle Preclassic anticipates the paired and doubled deities of much later Mexican religion.

Provenance: Private New England Collection, acquired from Arte Primitivo. Ex. Collection of Albert J. and Monique Grant, NYC., acquired 1950’s - 1960’s.

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Item #

73021

Condition
Clean repaired break line on neck and left arm restored.

Buyer's Premium
30%