Guachimontones

300 BCE

Round, bulls-eye buildings stand in the hills above Teuchitlán

Los Guachimontones is the largest Late Formative to Classic pre-Columbian site in the state of Jalisco, dating from 300 BCE to 450 or 500 CE. It stands in the hills above the town of Teuchitlán, which gives its name to the culture that built it. Its ceremonial buildings are bulls-eye shaped. They are called guachimontones, after the site, and are found mainly in the Tequila Valleys. The site is part of the UNESCO World Heritage area of Tequila.

The circle

A circle has a patio, a ring bench, an altar and four to sixteen platforms

A typical guachimontón has four basic features: the patio, the banquette, the altar and the platforms. The patio is a circular platform that forms the base. On it stand a ring-shaped banquette and, in the center, the altar. An even number of quadrangular platforms, from four to sixteen, sits on top of the banquette. The hillside part of the site has nine guachimontones, two ballcourts and a major and a minor plaza.

1974

Photographed in the 1890s, the circles went unrecognized for almost 70 years

The earliest documentation of the site comes from the Victorian artist Adela Breton, who traveled the Tequila Valleys in the 1890s. She took three photographs and made two sketch maps, but never published them. The form went undocumented by archaeologists for almost 70 years. In 1974 two publications, one by Phil Weigand and another by Joseph Mountjoy and Weigand, brought it to attention, and Weigand directed excavations from 1999 to 2011.

A town

Around 6,458 people may have lived here at the peak

In the Early Classic period, from 100 BCE to 200 CE, the site reached its maximum population. A settlement survey by Heredia Espinoza estimated between 3,690 and 9,225 people, with a mean of 6,458. In the Late Classic the population dropped and the cause is uncertain. No new monumental building was done after that, and the Postclassic people lived in small house groups on or near the abandoned ceremonial buildings.

6,458mean estimate of the site's population at its peak

Looting

Heavy looting put it on a list of the 100 most endangered sites

Because of heavy looting, the site was included on the 2008 World Monuments Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites. Its people belonged to the shaft tomb tradition, in which some were buried underground, sometimes with goods such as ceramic vessels, figurines, shell ornaments, conch shell trumpets and jadeite. One mound documented near San Marcos in the 1890s, with several burials, was being destroyed when the artist saw it.