Chacalilla

Chacalilla is a small farming village in the municipality of San Blas, Nayarit, on the flat coastal plain about 9 to 10 kilometers north of the port. It sits at the foot of Cerro Chacalilla, a low volcanic hill only about 55 meters high, with lagoons, mangroves and shrimp ponds on one side and the farmland of the plain on the other. The 2020 census counted 536 people, a little more than the 486 of 2010, and the village is the seat of an ejido whose members farm the surrounding land; local farm news lists it among the San Blas communities that grow beans, and it lies in a zone certified as low prevalence for fruit flies.

What makes Chacalilla unusual is what lies underneath it. The village and its ejido sit over part of a large pre-Hispanic settlement that flourished between about A.D. 900 and 1350 and is considered one of the great centers of the Aztatlán tradition, the culture that linked the Pacific coast of West Mexico through trade. Archaeologists describe a complex town with a ceremonial area, pyramid-like structures, platforms and causeways, a ball court, house areas and workshops for pottery and obsidian. Its position was strategic: from the hill people could fish the sea and the estuaries, farm the floodplain and use the resources of the nearby sierra. So far it is the southernmost of the big Aztatlán centers known.

The site was studied by a project led by Michael Ohnersorgen of the University of Missouri-St. Louis together with INAH, with a pilot season in 2003 and field seasons funded by the US National Science Foundation from 2007. In 2008 excavators working in the South Subgroup, a pair of low mounds that frame what looks like a sunken patio linked to sun worship and the farming cycle, found ten human skulls from people who had been sacrificed by decapitation, five women and five men, most of them young adults, with shaped skulls and some with filed teeth. A later study of their collagen concluded the skulls were laid down on at least four separate occasions, probably as offerings asking for rain. None of this is set up as a visitable archaeological zone: what you see today is an ordinary rural village, its fields and the low hill, a short drive from the beaches and mangrove boat trips of San Blas.