Chalchiuhtlicue, She of the Jade Skirt, is the Mexica goddess of ground water, of lakes, rivers, springs and the sea, and the companion, in various accounts wife or sister, of the rain-god Tlaloc. She presided over the water of birth: the colonial sources describe a naming-and-washing rite for newborns performed in her name, and she governed the perils of water as well as its blessing, able to drown and to flood as much as to nourish. In the sequence of world-ages she was said to rule the fourth sun, which ended in a great deluge that turned humankind into fish. She is depicted as a young woman in a skirt trimmed with jade and a blue-and-white headdress, sometimes with a stream of water bearing an infant, and she belonged to the cluster of rain-and-fertility deities honoured in the rituals of the agricultural year.
Excavations at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital's central pyramid, have recovered large deposits of shells in the ritual caches on the side of the building dedicated to the rain-god Tlaloc, offerings connected to the fertile, water-associated symbolism this cluster of deities shared. More than two hundred such offerings have been catalogued at the site in total, deposits of green stone, masks, worked shell and organic material laid down to mark building phases, accessions and disasters, giving Chalchiuhtlicue's watery domain a directly excavated, rather than purely textual, archaeological presence in the heart of the Mexica capital.