Spondylus was not just another shell. Across the Andean region and much of Mesoamerica it occupied a category of its own—too valuable for ordinary exchange, too symbolically loaded to appear in everyday contexts. Its intense red color associated it with blood and life; its spiny texture made it unmistakable among all marine materials. It has been found in high-ranking burials from northern Mexico to the Andean highlands, always in positions indicating it was a prestige good with restricted circulation.

The species lives at depths of 15 to 30 meters, in cold waters with strong currents, along the Pacific coast of present-day Ecuador and Peru. The divers who did that work were specialists—and the fact that this mural depicts the act of diving explicitly, rather than just the shell as a finished object, indicates that in Tetitla that expertise was recognized and valued.