Tlatilco Burnished Blackware Vessel, Two-Tiered Form

Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Tlatilco, 500 BCE. A burnished dark-brown vessel built in two tiers: a broad, squat lower body with a sharply defined square shoulder, surmounted by a tall cylindrical neck that flares to a rounded everted lip. A raised rope-like ridge encircles the shoulder junction, the only ornament on an otherwise austere profile that relies on silhouette and polish for its effect. The reduction-fired chocolate surface carries reddish-brown fire clouding and a tracery of pale root marks from long burial. Hand-built rather than thrown, the walls were smoothed and stone-burnished before firing. Such vessels served domestic and, likely, mortuary purposes, deposited with the dead in the cemetery zones of the Basin of Mexico. Size: 7" Diam x 8.25" H (17.8 cm Diam x 21.0 cm H).

Tlatilco, on the western shore of the former Lake Texcoco, was a farming village whose extensive burial grounds came to light in the 1930s and 1940s during commercial brickyard quarrying. Excavation recovered well over three hundred graves, furnished with hollow ceramic figurines, roller stamps, and darkly burnished vessels of precisely this reduction-fired class. The pottery combines a local Central Mexican tradition with unmistakable Olmec-affiliated elements, evidence that the Basin of Mexico participated early in the wider Formative exchange networks of Mesoamerica.

The chocolate to black surface is not a slip but the product of firing in a reducing, oxygen-starved atmosphere, with the sheen raised by patient burnishing with a smooth pebble before the vessel entered the fire.

Provenance: Private collection of a Chicago physician. Ex. Raymond Shapiro, collected in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

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Item #

73024

Condition
Strong root marks. Intact, excellent condition.

Buyer's Premium
30%