The piece shows distinctive elements of the aesthetics of the Chupicuaro people, such as a preference for vessels with silhouettes with compound and angular profiles. Even in its reduced dimensions, an elaborately shaped container was created.
The wide mouth and the spacious body allow the piece to be identified as a pot. Its mouth has an angular rim that is replicated in the concave base with a wider diameter. The smooth neck tapers and then the body features a series of wide horizontal grooves. Following the alternating pattern of smoothness and protrusions, the bottom of the pot is smooth again. The grooves are modeled with rolling, a manufacturing technique created by superimposing a spiral arrangement of dough kneaded as an elongated strip. Typically the surface is smoothed to erase traces of the ts, but in this case they remain.
The piece was covered with a layer of clay with pigment to produce an orange coloration, although the color scheme is not uniform. Dark hues were generated during firing in an insufficiently ventilated space. It is part of the monochrome ceramic type. In the context of its location, layers of salts adhered to it.
The Chupicuaro culture stands out for its extensive manufacture of fine ceramics in the form of vessels and sculptures. The former, partly with representational elements modeled and added to the shapes of the containers, had various uses: they were used for cooking and storage, surely both in daily and ritual settings; however, in some of them traces of use are marked and in others they are not detected. Vessels and sculptures have been recorded in archaeological works as offerings in human and even dog burials, as well as at surface sites and in isolated groups of intentionally buried objects.
Other testimonies of the Chupicuaro culture are: pyramidal bases with a circular floor, similar to those of Cuicuilco; sunken patios with a four-sided or circular floor (predating those that were diversified and abundantly built in the so-called "Sunken Patio Culture" of the Bajio region that date from the Classic period); direct burials in cemeteries and some in small tombs excavated in the ground in the shape of a shaft and chamber (it is inferred that it was under the influence of the shaft tomb culture); ornaments made of materials such as shell and stone; ceramic musical instruments; and everyday objects made of stone.
With regard to ceramics in particular, their study has enormous relevance, since they are portable objects that were distributed outside the territory of this culture in Western Mesoamerica. Their presence, as imported pieces or imitated styles, has been detected at sites such as Gualupita, Ticoman, Tlapacoya, Cuicuilco, Teotihuacan, and in the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley. In this way, they testify to the continuity of the links that, since the Middle Preclassic at least, existed between the West and the Central Highlands of Mexico, to the detriment of the prejudiced idea of the marginality of Western societies with respect to the dynamics of Mesoamerica.
Stylistically, this grooved monochrome pot presents qualities that I have defined for the pottery style of the Chupicuaro culture: geometrism, abstraction, angularity, and symmetry.
