The Women’s Tears: Teotihuacan’s Reproductive Promise

In 1997 archaeologists revealed a remarkable offering of largely female figurines within a platform near the outskirts of Teotihuacan. Deposited in four layers, the Teotihuacanos arranged the figurines in meaningful groupings that convey a vision of female gender roles emphasizing not only childbirth, but arguably the inherent danger women faced when bearing children, including potential miscarriage, stillbirth, and maternal mortality. Through an analysis of the figural arrangements, the decorative elements painted on the figurines, and the iconography of associated ceramic vessels, this paper suggests that the Teotihuacan state addressed the problem of a declining population by developing an ideology around childbirth that incentivized women to engage in this risky proposition. The ideology exhibited by this offering was not unique, as it will be linked to other state-sponsored offerings of a much larger scale, including the burials under the Feathered Serpent Pyramid and a spectacular deposit of materials inside the Moon Pyramid, each of which also occurred around 200-250 CE. The temporal and ideological consistency of these deposits indicates that the state made a concerted effort to unite its diverse population of migrants from throughout Mesoamerica by spatially imprinting an ideology of expected gender roles at a critical moment in the state’s development. The importance of this state effort is emphasized by the fact that it continued to shape gender ideologies for over a thousand years, culminating in the later Aztec belief of the defied Cihuateteo, women who died in childbirth.