The Tolita, Jama-Coaque and Bahía cultures flourished along Ecuador’s coast and the Chorrera culture arose five hundred years before our time from a common historical-cultural foundation.

The ceramic arts of these cultures are entirely figurative and are an expression of the artisans’ culture and imagination. Nevertheless, the variety of subjects was powerfully and arbitrarily limited by molds, perhaps in an effort to stay within the limits of a strict rule of symbolic and cultural expression.

For this reason its deities were represented by gestures evoking feline fury, and the human figure is portrayed with gestures and movements that lack this aggression.