For the sake of scale/context, how big is that dome on the left

The dome measures about 37.5m in diameter, 8m in total height. The entire structure, from platform to platform, measures approximately 99m. This circular arrangement of platforms around a patio space and central structure we call an altar is called a guachimonton.

The naming can get confusing. The site in the picture above is called Los Guachimontones and is named after a district in the town this site is located near. Each individual structure, however, is called a guachimonton. The town is called Teuchitlan and we named the culture who built these structures the Teuchitlan culture.

At Los Guachimontones there are eight guachimontones and two ballcourts. There is a sister site located further up the hill with five guachimontones and one ballcourt. The immediate area of these two sites makes this the largest site in the Tequila valleys.

There are about 50 or so guachimontones in the Tequila valleys with one in the Bolaños canyon to the north, one by Puerto Vallarta, one by the town of Comala in Colima, one in the western area of the Atemajac Valley (where Guadalajara is), and several in Guanajuato to the east. There's supposedly one in Nayarit and another at La Campana in Colima, though I've never seen pictures or drawings of it.

Speculatively, why is this not discussed or researched? Funding? Interest? Not sexy enough?

Jalisco, Nayarit, and Colima are known more for their large and small, hollow and solid ceramic figures and dioramas that are attributed to the shaft and chamber tombs the dead were buried in at that time. Gong as far back as the Early Formative (1500 BC to 800 BC), the people in this widespread region buried their dead in these shaft and chamber tombs. The earliest ones are located at El Opeño in Michoacan by Lake Chapala. This cemetery consisted of simple chambers dug into the ground with a short staircase to reach them. The chamber would be sealed off and the staircase back filled. The tradition continued through the Middle Formative (800 BC to 300 BC) in places like Mascota, Jalisco with simple chambers and simple vertical shafts to reach those chambers. It wasn't until the Late Formative and Early Classic periods (300 BC to 550 AD) that shaft and chamber tombs became more numerous and more elaborate. El Arenal is the largest tomb known to date and was 17m underground with three well carved chambers dug into the soil for the dead. Unfortunately, the tomb was partially looted before Corona Nuñez and a few later Stanley Long were able to document it.

Because these tombs are underground and have little to no surface indicators, almost all of the thousands of ceramic figures in museums across the globe were looted. A lot of this looting was opportunistic in which a farmer finds a depression in his field, digs down a couple of meters, robs the tomb, and sells it to someone in the city who then sells it to museums or art collectors. Some looters made it their job to go around and find these tombs using long metal bars to punch into the ground to try and find a chamber. This looting, however, is not new and has been occurring since the late 1800s. So, too, has the creation of fake ceramic figures been an industry/occupation in this region which casts doubt in the authenticity of the figures in museums today.

Because of this looting, the volume of figures, and the fact that guachimontones are not spectacularly large like pyramids in eastern Mexico or even the yacatas in Michoacan, no one really bothered to take a look any surface architectural remains. Adela Breton was the first one to document these guachimontones in a letter to a friend. While she published the photo of the mound being looted (possibly an altar from a guachimonton) as well as photos and watercolors of the figures recovered from the mound, she never published her sketches of the site. As a result, the most anyone really did when documenting surface architecture was note that there were mounds. If you look at that first picture in the El Arenal album, you can see the arrangement of an altar and platforms that is typical of a guachimonton. But no one recognized it as such. It wasn't until the 1970s that Phil Weigand and his wife noticed these things for what they were when they saw the guachimontones near the town of Ahualulco. Weigand and his wife did some amazing work from the 70s to the 90s doing a lot of small scale survey work, site map drawing, photos, surface finds, etc., but a lot of their work has remained unpublished or published in obscure sources. I had heard that Phil was ridiculed by colleagues who studied other parts of Mesoamerica saying he didn't find anything or that it wasn't important, which drove him towards publishing in obscure places or not publishing at all. He's been vindicated and was able to procure the funds to restore the Los Guachimontones site, but he did not live long enough to see the study of these structures really take off. Phil passed away in 2011 and the study of guachimontones is still trying to take off.

I was drawn to this area because of the unique structures. I thought about continuing with Maya studies in my undergrad until I learned more about the Tarascans in Michoacan. They were so different from the Aztecs and I thought that was intriguing. But then I learned about the Teuchitlan culture and was blown away by how different they were from everyone else. So part of the lack of investigation is interest. Another part has to do with colonial history.

When the Spanish arrived in the Jalisco region, Nahuatl speakers had invaded and completely changed the region. We can pinpoint this at the end the 500s/early 600s when drought gripped the region. This same drought effected Teotihuacan and most likely drove Nahuatl speakers out of marginal areas on the border of Mesoamerica that could not continue to support agriculture. Areas like Zacatecas or Guanajuato. These people fled southward and created a ripple effect. Those that stayed behind just created more people for later migrations in Mesoamerica at the start of the Early Postclassic and Late Postclassic. The Aztecs were the third wave of migrants that occurred at the beginning of the Late Postclassic. Many of the people in the Basin of Mexico when the Aztecs arrived were second wave migrants. And the Toltecs (and maybe the Pipil of El Salvador) appear to be first wave migrants.

But because of the drought and the influx of these migrants in Jalisco, the people stopped building guachimontones. They stopped burying their dead in shaft and chamber tombs. They stopped making ceramic figures in earlier period styles. Instead they adopted the more typical Mesoamerican monumental architecture with stepped platforms. They buried their dead in pits or box-shaped tombs. They brought in other art styles for ceramics, figures, etc. It was a complete change to the point where Epiclassic and Postclassic sites were built away from Late Formative and Classic period sites. You don't see sites with a long chronology going back from 1492 to 300 BC. You see sites that are either 1492 to 550 AD or 550 AD to 300 BC+. There's some kind of breakdown in which the people in the area were either all wiped out (unlikely) or completely rejected everything about their culture in favor of this new culture without ever revisiting their old one (loss of faith?).

When the Spanish arrived they arrived to a region made up of tiny city-states with multiple languages and multiple cultures. Sometimes these languages/cultures coexisted within one area and other times there were fierce rivalries between two neighboring towns. But because there was no large empire or state it was hard for the Spanish to control the region. The Spanish were frustrated because they wanted riches and these people did not produce riches in sufficient quantities like the Aztecs or Tarascans. So many of the Spanish resorted to legal and illegal slaving and sold many people off in the slave markets of Mexico City. Eventually a number of these groups set aside their differences, banded together, and rebelled. They used the Spaniard's own unawareness of cultures and languages to openly organize so that when they rebelled, they rebelled as one. This became the Mixton War of 1540 to 1541. Ida Altman has a great book on this topic. Tragically the early and successful resistance of the Natives was broken by the Spanish. And as punishment the Spanish killed many people, enslaved many more, and decimated the culture and language of these people. So we don't have things like the Florentine Codex or Relacion de Michoacan to turn to because the Spanish never bothered to document all the groups in this area as well. And when people wanted to document the cultures and languages of the past, the cultures and languages had either disappeared, were replaced with Spanish culture, or was culture brought by Aztecs, Tarascans, and Tlaxcallans that were made to settle in this now emptied region of the country.

So with not much in the way of Postclassic/contact sites to study, no pre-hispanic writing to turn to, sites that didn't fit the norm for the rest of Mesoamerica, and hard to find tombs, interest and research just hasn't been the same in West Mexico as it has in eastern Mexico.

Hopefully I can help change that.