Tlatilco Pottery Two Face “Pretty Lady” Bust

Middle Preclassic, ca. 1200 to 500 B.C. Central Highlands, Mexico. 
This two face Tlatilco bust is significant because it condenses several core concerns of Early Formative central Mexican society: fertility, duality, and a fascination with extraordinary bodies that likely carried supernatural or cosmological meaning. Bicephalic and double‑faced Tlatilco figures are rare within a large corpus of single‑headed “pretty ladies,” so the duplication of the head is deliberate and symbolically charged rather than a stylistic accident.

Many scholars read these works as visualizations of duality paired but integrated principles such as life/death, day/night, or earth/underworld which becomes a fundamental theme throughout later Mesoamerican religions. Most Tlatilco figurines are female, emphasizing hips, thighs, and the lower belly; this has long tied them to ideas of fertility, sexuality, and life‑giving power, even when the body carries deformities.
Tlatilco artisans showed a special interest in physical anomalies: hunchbacks, dwarfs, contorted acrobats, and especially two‑headed or fused‑face females; more than other contemporaneous Olmec‑related sites.

As a clearly legible fragent of a two‑headed figure, this stands at the intersection of medical observation, religious symbolism, and elite feminine imagery, making it an especially valuable document of how Tlatilco people conceptualized the borders between the human and the divine. 

This two face example shares a central eye and has remnants of the neck and chest. Missing arms and part of fillet headband and forehead.  Particularly nice almond shaped eyes with added ocher pigment remaining.  
Size 1-7/8 inches Height; 2-5/8 in on custom mount.  
Compare similar example in The Jaguar's Children: Pre-Classic Central Mexico. by  Coe, Michael D.  NY: Museum of Primitive Art, 1965.  

Provenance: Private Mercer Island WA collection by descent from Ruth Goldwyn Capps & Henry McClure Capps (known as Mac) who was an art director and production designer for TV & films in the mid-1950s.