Carved in pale stone, this 6-foot-tall woman wears a peaked headdress, circular earrings, and the wide hip belt and knee pads of an ancient Mesoamerican athlete. Her expression is fearless and she strikes a triumphant pose. She grabs the victim's severed hair with her right hand.
The sculpture is the first life-size representation of a ceremonial baseball player ever found in Huasteca, a tropical region that spans parts of several states along the Gulf Coast.
Like virtually every other Mesoamerican society, the Huasteca people played a game known today simply as “ball” in the pre-Hispanic era. Despite its name and association with modern soccer, the match was more a sacred ritual than a sport.
For athletes who bounced hard, dangerously heavy rubber balls against their hips, it was a means of communicating with the gods, and sometimes involved human sacrifice.
The athlete will be one of the most important artifacts in the exhibit “Ancient Huastecan Women: Goddesses, Warriors, Rulers,” which opens Friday at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. This is the first time the work, discovered by a landowner near Alamo in Veracruz state nearly 50 years ago, will be on public display.
“Many people who study ancient Mesoamerica would be shocked to see this work,” said Cesareo Moreno, the museum's visual arts director and chief curator.
“This is a completely unconventional sculpture,” said archaeologist David Antonio Morales of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Veracruz. He discovered the statue by chance last November while visiting his personal collection.
He contacted María Eugenia Maldonado, one of the few archaeologists specializing in Huasteca's pre-Columbian past. At first, she didn't think the figure was real. This is the first stone statue of a baseball player found in the area, the first of a female baseball player, and the first to hold a severed head of this size.
“All the elements are combined into a single sculpture that I have never seen before,” she said. “That's the significance of this sculpture.”
Kim N. Richter, a pre-Columbian art historian at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and an expert on female figures from the region, had not seen the work. “This will be very important because until now Huasteca has had no monumental sculptures of ball players, male or female,” she said. “So that in itself would be a huge discovery.”
During the Classical Period (200-950 A.D.), “All we have are ceramic figurines of this size,” she says in a video call, her hands about a foot apart. . “They're beautiful and exquisite, but having something in stone would be really remarkable.”
This piece has another unique element that Dr. Maldonado discovered while sketching. “I noticed that under the decapitated person's head there was an emoji that was probably the name of the decapitated person,” she said. The name takes the form of a symbol and a number in a circle, and it appears that the person was known as Four Death.
“This is not an anonymous symbol of a sacrificial ritual,” Moreno said. “That's a real person and someone she has her head around.”
Dr. Maldonado hopes the exhibition, which features 100 artifacts, will challenge what she calls “superficial” interpretations of women's roles that have obscured scholarship in the region. He said he was there. For decades, archaeologists have depicted sculptures of men as individuals in positions of power, such as priests or rulers. They tended to ignore female sculptures as images of fertility goddesses.
“The sculptures you see in most museums here in Mexico interpret these sculptures as the god Tlazolteotl,” she said.
However, Dr. Maldonado believes there is too much variety in the sculptures to represent a single character, and One Piece depicts a bare-chested woman with intricate scars on her chest and shoulders. . Another woman with large eyes and parted lips, known as the Young Woman of Amajac, wears her long skirt, blouse, and headdress that cascades down the sides.
Compared to other Mesoamerican regions, Huasteca has been neglected for a variety of reasons. From the 19th century to his 20th century, countless artifacts were unearthed by oil drillers and explorers, but they were sold or stored without proper documentation.
In recent years, cartel violence has made excavation difficult. “The people who worked there for 40 years left and haven't come back,” Dr. Richter said.
With limited funds, archaeological priorities are often those cultures that built the impressive stone pyramids that attract millions of tourists each year.
Dr. Maldonado said he hopes the exhibit will help promote scholarship about the Huasteca and foster indigenous pride. She is taking lessons in Tenek, the regional language, but her teacher tells her that local children are becoming increasingly embarrassed to speak Tenek.
“I think this also helps people understand that even outside of Mexico, there are people who are interested in their culture,” she says.