[ti:Mexican Farmers Find Large Statue of Mystery Woman] [by:www.51voa.com] [00:00.00]更多听力请访问51VOA.COM [00:00.04]Farmers were digging among fruit trees on a farm on Mexico's coast [00:06.92]when they found a big surprise: a stone statue almost two meters tall. [00:14.68]The female statue may represent an influential woman rather than a goddess, [00:21.52]or some mix of the two, experts said earlier this month. [00:28.24]The National Institute of Anthropology and History [00:32.68]said this was the first such statue in the Huasteca area of Mexico. [00:42.08]The statue had a complex hairpiece and showed evidence [00:47.04]that the female subject may have held a high status. [00:53.04]The piece may date to around 1450 to 1521, the institute said. [01:02.40]The place where it was found is near El Tajin, [01:06.88]a pre-Hispanic city from the early 9th to 13th centuries. [01:13.68]But the statue shows some influences of the Aztecs. [01:19.60]The farmers found the piece on New Year's Day [01:23.08]and quickly reported it to officials. [01:27.60]The area where it was found [01:30.00]had not been known to be an archeological site. [01:35.00]And the statue may have been moved from another, unknown site. [01:42.40]The person represented by the open-mouthed, [01:45.84]wide-eyed statue remains a mystery. [01:51.08]Institute archaeologist María Eugenia Maldonado Vite wrote [01:58.40]that "this could be a ruler," based on her stance and clothing. [02:04.84]She may not have been a goddess. [02:07.84]But Maldonado said the statue could be a mix of the Teem goddesses [02:14.84]and women of high political or social status in Huasteca. [02:23.04]Those goddesses were part of a fertility cult, she said. [02:30.40]Susan Gillespie is an anthropology professor at the University of Florida. [02:38.92]She said Aztec documents from colonial times made note [02:44.20]of women "rulers" who passed their power on to successors. [02:51.88]"Women were highly valued in the pre-Hispanic" times [02:56.20]and lost their status only after the Spanish conquest, Gillespie added. [03:03.80]However, she noted that "if there is only one such find, [03:10.56]it's hard to say" how important it is or even if it is correctly identified. [03:18.92]Archaeology works best with repeated findings, she explained. [03:25.36]In 1994 at the Mayan ruin site of Palenque, [03:30.84]archaeologists found the tomb of a woman called The Red Queen. [03:38.12]That name came from the red color that covered her tomb, [03:43.44]which dates to between 600 and 700 A.D. [03:50.60]But it has never been clearly established [03:54.48]that the woman was a ruler of Palenque. [03:58.88]I'm Alice Bryant. 更多听力请访问51VOA.COM