[2] Although often included with the cultures of the Mexican West, Chupícuaro is both close to the Valley of Mexico and the northern edge of Meso-America.

Information on the eponymous site, composed of several burial grounds, remains fragmentary, since most of it was flooded when the Presa Solis dam was built in the 1940s.

[4] The name derives from the Purépecha language word chupicua, a name for the Ipomoea plant, used for blue dye, and the term ro, place.

This prehispanic archaeological site is located on the banks of the Lerma River, between the present-day cities of Acámbaro and Tarandacuao in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico.

The first became the largest city in Mesoamerica and the main ceremonial center of the Valley of Mexico; it maintained relations with Chupícuaro.

The decline of Cuicuilco paralleled the emergence of Teotihuacán, and consumed with the eruption of the Xitle volcano circa 150 CE, which led to migration north from the Valley of Mexico.

The Acambaro Valley, located near the Lerma river, served as a vital passageway connecting western and central Mexico, as well as the Chupicuaro culture.

The San Juan del Río region was also significant as a trade route for the Chupicuaro people, and later during the Teotihuacan era.

The region's trade was sustained by a complex network of roads, which followed the ancient pathways first built by the Chupicuaro communities during the Late Preclassic period.

Ceramics included multiple monochromatic forms and a variety of three-color polychrome (red, beige and black) with pyramidal geometrical drawings or zig-zags.

[2] From a study of ceramic styles, the clothing used is inferred, they painted their faces and bodies, wore sandals, truss, necklaces, earflaps, and earrings.

However, a 2019 study by Vazquez De Agregados-Pascual et al. discovered the use of Maya-blue pigment to be at least 250 BCE through the analysis of funerary artifacts found in a 2001 excavation at La Tronera, located on the east side of the Acambaro Valley in West Mexico.

This analysis of the pigments used in the funerary artifacts places the origin of Maya-blue in an older temporality and in a non-Mayan Pre-Hispanic culture, showing that the people of the Chupicuaro culture had already mastered the technology and the know-how needed to manufacture this blue pigment by the end of the Middle Pre-Classic Period.

[11] Chupícuaro inhabitants practiced a cult of the dead characterized by tombs where they placed trophy skulls, obsidian arrowheads, metates, figurines, earflaps, shell ornaments, necklaces and beads, bone artifacts and musical instruments.