While the Teotihuacan, Zapoteca or Maya regional traditions developed with fairly uniform styles that extended to the areas influenced by the commercial and military activities of states like Teotihuacan, Monte Alban or Tikal, in Western Mesoamerica, a completely different tradition proliferated. It is often called "the shaft tomb tradition", because all the objects that represent it are vessels used for offerings, the accompanying figures and other artifacts of a burial nature that were found at the bottom of the characteristic tombs excavated in the tepetate (compacted earth) of the West.

The ceramic art of the West is lively, expressive, imaginative, festive, and sometimes disproportionate. It plays with the human form, its facial features and postures. Generally, the potters of the West made hollow figures. They were never molded, but always carefully modeled by hand. These characteristics describe the majority of the works from the shaft tomb tradition; however, it is not a homogeneous tradition as different stylistic variations were cultivated in every town and settlement. One of these varieties has been described with the term "elephantine". Once can understand the appropriateness of the term just by looking at this piece; not only because the figures look like elephants, but also because their bodies look like they are affected by elephantiasis due to the colossal way in which the lower limbs are swollen.

The types of shapes achieved by the craftsman of the West remind us a great deal of this experimental phase of the Mesoamerican pottery that we associate with Tlatilco. Indeed, in Tlatilco, we also find the assimilation of two different concepts: ceramic sculpture and the vessel. The human form is adapted to work as a recipient. In this case, the arch of the legs has a design comparable to that of the vessels called "stirrup" cups.

To understand the meaning of effigy vessels in general, and especially those from Western Mexico, it is useful to that for the Mesoamerican towns, the sacred souls or forces that gave life to humankind and to the rest of the living beings circulated around the bodies of living creatures and vanished after death; however, they could be contained for example when a jade bead was placed in the mouth of the deceased. The effigy vessels could have been provisional recipients for the soul of the deceased. Although it has also been argued that they held liquids that were given to the deceased on their journey.