The six-foot-tall woman, carved in pale stone, wears a peaked headdress, circular earrings, and the wide hip belt and knee pads of an ancient Mesoamerican athlete. Her expression is fierce, her pose triumphant. In her right hand she grasps by the hair the severed head of a sacrificial victim.
The sculpture is the first life-size representation of a ceremonial player found to date in the Huasteca, a tropical region that spans parts of several states along the Gulf of Mexico coast.
Like almost every other Mesoamerican society, the Huasteca people played what is simply known today as “the ball game”, in the era before the Spanish conquest. Despite its name and its links to modern football, this game was more sacred than sport.
For the players, who bounce a solid, dangerously heavy rubber ball from their hips, it was a means of communication with the gods, which sometimes culminated in human sacrifice.
The ball player will be one of the most prominent objects in an exhibit, “Ancient Huasteca Women: Goddesses, Warriors and Rulers,” at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, which opens Friday. This is the first time the piece, which was discovered by landowners about 50 years ago near Álamo, Veracruz, is on public display.
“A lot of people who study ancient Mesoamerica will be shocked when they see this piece,” said Cesáreo Moreno, the museum’s director of visual arts and chief curator.
“It’s a completely atypical sculpture,” said David Antonio Morales, an archaeologist at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Veracruz, who came across it last November while visiting private collections.
He contacted María Eugenia Maldonado, one of the few archaeologists specializing in the pre-Columbian Huasteca past. At first, he didn’t believe the figure could be real. It would be the first stone sculpture of a ballador found in the area, the first female athlete and the first on this scale to hold a decapitated head.
“It puts all the elements into a single sculpture that has never been seen together before,” he said. “That is the significance of this sculpture.”
Kim N. Richter, a historian of pre-Columbian art at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and an expert on female statues from the region, had not seen the piece. “It would be very important because we don’t have monumental sculptures of Huasteca players to this day, male or female,” he said. “So that would be a huge discovery in itself.”
In the Classic Period (AD 200 to 950), “all we have are ceramic figurines that are about that big,” she continued in a video call, holding her hands about a foot apart. “They’re beautiful, they’re exquisite, but to have something in stone would be really remarkable.”
The piece has another unique element that Dr. Maldonado discovered as she sketched it. “I realized that under the decapitated head is a glyph that is probably the name of the person whose head was cut off,” he said. The names took the form of a sign and a number denoted by circles: It seems that the person was known as the four deaths.
“It is not an anonymous symbol of a sacrificial ritual,” Mr. Moreno said. “He is actually someone who existed, a person whose head he holds.”
Dr Maldonado says she hopes the exhibition, with 100 objects, will challenge what she calls “superficial” interpretations of women’s roles that have flooded knowledge of the area. For decades, archaeologists have described sculptures of men as people in positions of authority, such as priests or rulers. They tend to dismiss sculptures of women as images of a fertility goddess.
“The carvings that you find in most museums here in Mexico, they interpret these carvings as the deity Tlazolteotl,” he said.
But Dr. Maldonado believes there is too much variety in the sculptures to represent a single character. One piece depicts a bare-chested woman with intricate injuries to her chest and shoulders. Another, with open eyes and parted lips, known as the Young Woman of Amayak, wears a long skirt, blouse, and a headdress that cascades down either side, like a waterfall.
Compared to other Mesoamerican regions, the Huasteca has been neglected for several reasons. In the 19th and 20th centuries, countless artifacts were unearthed by prospectors and oil explorers, who sold or kept them without proper documentation.
In recent years, cartel violence has hampered excavations. “People who worked there for 40 years left and never came back,” Dr. Richter said.
With limited funds, the archaeological priority has often been the civilizations that built the impressive stone pyramids that attract millions of tourists each year.
Dr. Maldonado says she hopes this exhibit will help advance scholarship on the Huasteca and foster a sense of pride for its indigenous people. She is taking lessons in Tenek, a local language, which her teacher told her local children are increasingly embarrassed to speak.
“I think this should also help people see that someone else, even outside of Mexico, cares about their culture,” he said.