Not far from the lagoon of Alvarado, in the ancient city of Cerro de las Mesas, history began very early; always linked to the development of the Olmec culture, it knew how to keep the artistic style of this ancient people of Mesoamerica alive. It was in this environment where the stelae celebrate the rulers and where ball games ended up becoming fundamental to the worshiping of the king. The ballgame implied human sacrifice and, perhaps, its introduction in central Veracruz is linked to a series of trade routes that flowed from southern Mexico, across the Izapa region and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to reach the shores of the Gulf, and where, from early times, ritual decapitation also spread.

Commerce had played a decisive role in its formation and would continue to be the focus of further development. Its location on top of a hill must have been preceded by formidable tasks of ground leveling, which can only be explained within a hierarchical society that led, for the first time in its history, to a real monumental architecture. The huge pyramids of soil and the ceremonial corridors dedicated to the ritual ballgame became elements of an architectural complex that would identify new centers of government from the Protoclassic (ca. 300 AD) and in which Cerro de las Mesas occupies a prominent place

Signs carved on stone stelae offer a structure similar to those of the early Stela C of Tres Zapotes and the carvings on the Estatuilla de Tuxtlas, which is why they seem to gather, along with the Estela de la Mojarra, currently displayed in the Museum of Anthropology in Xalapa, a sophisticated calendar and writing system of great complexity whose background may be associated with the Olmec culture. It is this elite culture which Justeson and Kaufman have called epiolmeca (ca. 300 B.C.-250 A.D.). It's last stage of development coincides, in central Veracruz, with the production of a group of stelae around the Papaloapan River basin clearly linked to the exaltation of the rulers.

Only in Cerro de las Mesas was an important sculptural work produced although, certainly, not the only place where stelae were erected during the Early Classic period; this cultural phenomenon does not seem to have reached a regional dimension to take it beyond the Sierra de los Tuxtlas. In fact, it is possible that it remained near the sea and did not try to penetrate too far into the territory. Just before the Late Classic, the immense power amassed by several generations of leaders seems to have come to an end, perhaps in correspondence with the end of commercial hegemony of Teotihuacan on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. This was when government centers multiplied and when the elements to be defined by the Classical culture of Veracruz appear, such as the modeling of large clay figures, mostly in places devoid of stone.

The Mixtequilla, the region upon which the cultural model of Cerro de las Mesas would have influence, maintained certain individuality thanks to active trade with the mountains of Oaxaca throughout their cultural development. Although the Late Classic was marked by the local production of "monumental" clay objects and of Smiling Figurines, elements corresponding to the cultural universe of Monte Alban are perceived.

The piece that concerns us here is extraordinary in several respects. It shows the first steps of a technological development aimed at the production of large clay figures. The features of the face, on the other hand, are typologically associated with statuettes from the Early Classic period but, there is no doubt that it is in clear transition towards monumental pottery. The closed eyes and open mouth place it squarely in a series of characteristic cults of the Late Classic but that here they are not fully developed.

Broken, without a body, a small clay plate with the portrait of the profile of a fantastic animal, a kind of mammal endowed with big teeth and a powerful snout is attached to the headdress on a band that appears to bind the hair. This is a recurring configuration in the ceramic art of this region of Veracruz, and it is very likely that it is related, in its origins, with a series of Oaxacan elements first incorporated and now developed in the local tradition. It is irable, in the case of Mictlantecuhtli de El Zapotal, that an immense polychrome sculpture of raw clay, as preserved in the headdress and how even iconographic motifs of sculptural reliefs from the Cerro de las Mesas remain.