Xochitécatl

Xochitécatl is an archaeological zone on the summit of the hill of the same name, an extinct volcano rising about 200 metres above the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley in the municipality of Natívitas, southwest of Tlaxcala city. Its buildings cover about 12 hectares of the hilltop between the Atoyac and Zahuapan rivers, and from the plaza you can see Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl to the west and La Malinche to the east. The Nahuatl name joins xōchitl, flower, and tecatl, person, roughly "lineage of flowers". INAH runs it as one zone with Cacaxtla, the city of the murals, which stands on the neighbouring hill in plain view.

Building began around 800 BC, in the Middle Preclassic, with the Pyramid of the Flowers, the Serpent Building and the Spiral Building. Between about 350 BC and AD 100 it was the seat of a chiefdom that controlled much of western Tlaxcala, and it was above all a ceremonial centre rather than a city: people lived spread out on terraces of houses and fields on the slopes. An eruption of Popocatépetl around the first century and the years after it led to its abandonment. Between AD 600 and 950 the Olmeca-Xicalanca of Cacaxtla reoccupied it as a secondary ritual centre and built the Platform of the Volcanoes; then both sites were left empty, although the hill was still used for rituals.

The Pyramid of the Flowers is the largest building, with a base of roughly 100 by 140 metres, close in size to the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan. More than 30 burials were found in it, almost all of children, and the offerings on its stairway held thousands of clay figurines showing women at every stage of life: girls, pregnant women, mothers with children and old women. This is why archaeologists link the site to a fertility and rain cult. The pyramid faces La Malinche, and every 29 September the sun rises directly over the volcano as seen from its summit. Two large monolithic basins stand in front of the stairway; the bigger one held stone sculptures of a toad, a serpent and two human faces. The Spiral Building is a round pyramid with no staircase, climbed by following its spiral, and is thought to have been a temple to Ehécatl, the wind god; a cross was set on its top in 1632 and is still there. The Serpent Building keeps a basin with a stela carved with fangs and a forked tongue. The main excavations, led by Mari Carmen Serra Puche, took place between 1992 and 1994, and the site opened to the public in 1994. A site museum displays finds from the hill, including many of the figurines.