Ancient female sculpture found in eastern Mexico

Mexico City – Farmers digging in a citrus orchard in the Mexican state of Veracruz found a female sculpture almost 6 meters high, which could represent an elite woman rather than a deity or a mixture of both, experts said on Friday.

It is the first statue of its kind found in the Tuxpan River basin, south of Huasteca in Veracruz, according to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

The woman in the sculpted sculpture has an elaborate hat and other signs of her social status and could date between 1450 and 1521, INAH claimed. Although the piece was found near the pre-Hispanic ruins of El Tajín, it shows some Aztec influence.

Farmers digging on the farm found the sculpture on New Year’s Day and quickly alerted authorities. The area where it was found was not considered an archeological site, and the stone statue could have been moved from an unknown location.

It is not known for sure who the statue is, which has large eyes and an open mouth.

María Eugenia Maldonado Vite, an archaeologist at INAH, wrote that this piece represents a young woman “possibly a leader due to her posture and attire, rather than a deity.”

The figure could be “a late fusion of the Teem goddesses with representations of women with high social or political status in Huasteca,” Maldonado said. These goddesses were part of a fertility cult.

Elsewhere, pre-Hispanic figures representing leading or high-ranking women have been found in Mexico.

In 1994, on the site of the Mayan ruin in Palenque, archaeologists found the grave of a woman they named the Red Queen because of the color of the pigment that covered her grave. But it was never firmly established that the woman, whose tomb dates from 600 to 700 AD, was a ruler of Palenque.