Although the maker of this incense burner (incensario) lid is unknown, there was probably more than one artisan involved in the construction of this common ritual object. Individual pieces, such as the base, lid, chimney, and armature, were mass-produced in ceramic workshops located throughout the city of Teotihuacan, usually near temples or other buildings that appear to have had a religious affiliation. Clay symbols called adornos that decorated incensarios were similarly usually mass-produced with molds in workshops. However, many of the adornos on this lid were handmade, which makes it unusual. Adornos could be individually selected and placed on an incensario to serve the worship practices or other representational needs of the person commissioning the piece. Such commissions were probably common because no identical Teotihuacán incensarios are known to exist.

Incensarios were used in many kinds of religious rituals throughout Mesoamerica. Like this one, they were covered with layers of complicated symbolism. The face in the middle of this lid may represent a deceased ancestor or deity within a temple. The butterfly, flower, and seashell adornos—symbols of transformation, the soul, war, water, and fertility—would have been appropriate emblems for a vessel honoring ancestors or the gods. The triangle and rectangle motif that appears three times between the flowers in the headdress is the glyph for a year and is also related to warfare. The head of the feathered serpent at the top of the lid represents an important deity to which the largest temple at Teotihuacan is dedicated.  A popular god in many Mesoamerican cultures, it was called Quetzalcoatl by the later Aztecs and was usually associated with the sky, rain, and fertility.

At Teotihuacan, an incense burner consisted of an elaborate conical lid and an hourglass base (now missing from this work). The copal, or tree resin, burned in the base sent smoke wafting heavenward through the lid as part of a ritual and prayer. This smoke represented rain clouds and, ultimately, fertility. In this example, the smoke would have been expelled from the serpent’s mouth at the top of the lid and from the eyes of the face in the center. Most of the adornos on this lid were handmade and attached using lime-stucco cement. Traces of the original paint remain on this remarkably preserved work.

The ruins of Teotihuacan lie approximately forty-five miles northeast of modern-day Mexico City. In its day, the city was a cultural, religious, and economic focal point of the Mesoamerican world (from about 450–650 A.D.). With a population of 120,000 to 200,000, the area was one of the largest preindustrial cities in the world at the time, and people converged at its center to exchange goods and to pay homage to their gods. Centuries later, the Aztecs (c. 1325–1521) stood in awe of the architectural sophistication of the ruins of the city’s temples and pyramids. In honor of that splendor, they named it Teotihuacan, a word in their native Nahuatl language meaning “city of the gods,” and consecrated the ruins as a sacred and ceremonial site for worship.