We have other figures that recreate that town for us with their ritual clothes and ornaments, carrying sacred chests or carrying felines.
In them we distinguish the clothes worn by the elegant ones of the time, consisting of huge huipiles that reached down to the feet. Analyzing the iconographic elements present in these clay sculptures, we realize that many of the gods of the Mesoamerican pantheon were already venerated by the people of the coast in this classical period; we have Tlaloc, the deity of rain, who is identified by the blinders that, like a ritual mask, cover his face; the already mentioned lord of the dead, of whom the people of the coast made some highly stylized representations; Huehuetéotl is also present, the old god of fire, whose origin seems to go back to the time of Cuicuilco (300 years BC) in central Mexico.
It seems that on the Gulf Coast of Mexico there was a special insistence on the cults related to the ritual sport of the ball game, since several courts have been discovered. In the center of Veracruz, the ball game is linked to the so-called “Complex of yokes, palms and axes”, a set of small or medium-size sculptures worked in hard and compact rocks of green and grayish colors.
First of all, it must be said that in the development of the game, the participants had to protect their waist and internal organs with wide belts, probably made of wood and lined with cotton and leather textiles. These protectors are perhaps the antecedent and pattern of the sculptures called yokes, horseshoe-shaped or some totally closed. The artists took advantage of its curious conformation to carve fantastic figures on the exterior walls and on the finishes that recall the faces of felines or batrachians, nocturnal birds, such as the owl, or human profiles.
The palms owe their name to their elongated shape and the curved top reminiscent of the leaves of this tree. Some authors consider that they could well be used as heraldic insignia that identified the players or their guilds and brotherhoods. Several of these sculptures resemble the bat, others describe ritual scenes in which we recognize victorious warriors, skeletons whose flesh is eaten by predatory animals, or sacrificial victims with open chests.
With regard to the so-called axes, what we can say about them is that they have been considered as the stone stylization of the heads that were obtained by decapitation, a culminating point in the ritual of the ball game. Indeed, the most well-known objects refer us to human profiles of great beauty, such as the famous ax of the man-dolphin that belonged to the Miguel Covarrubias collection; There are also profiles of mammalian animals or birds, but we ignore their direct association with the alleged sacrifice.
The maximum cultural development of this central coastal region took place in the site of El Tajin, located near the smiling town of Papantla. Apparently, its development comprised a long occupation that goes from 400 to 1200 AD, that is, from the Classic to the early Postclassic, in Mesoamerican periodification.
The difference in height of the terrain in El Tajín determined two areas. In the first place, the visitor who arrives at the site and begins his journey finds a series of architectural complexes located in the lower part. The group of the stream and the group of the Pyramid of the Niches are the first architectural ensembles that come to pass; The latter owes its name to the famous pyramidal structure that has been known since the 18th century and which has made the archaeological city famous. It is a basement of stepped bodies whose characteristic elements are the combination of a wall made up of niches that are supported on a sloping slope and that are finished off by a projecting cornice. The viewer who contemplates this building receives the most impressive and solemn impression of the perfect balance that those ancestral native architects achieved when they managed to balance grandeur and grace.
In the vicinity of the Pyramid of the Niches there are several courts of the ball game, which in El Tajín are characterized by the fact that the vertical walls inside the courtyards are decorated with reliefs that describe the various moments and paraphernalia of the sacred sport. In the scenes we recognize the beheading of one of the players, the cult of the maguey and pulque, the dances and the transformation of the victims into celestial animals such as the eagle. The artists framed each of the scenes with a decorative element that has long been called "the Totonaco interlace", which is distinguished because a kind of hooks or scrolls are intertwined in a sensual way; At first glance it would seem like the movement of the waters, the overlapping of the clouds or the violence of the wind and the hurricane.
