A replica of a mysterious pre-Hispanic sculpture of an Indigenous woman has been chosen to replace a statue of Christopher Columbus on Mexico City’s most prominent boulevard. The statue was unearthed in January in the Huasteca region, near Mexico’s Gulf coast. It’s known as the Young Woman of Amajac, after the village where she was found buried in a field. But nobody really knows who the stone sculpture was supposed to depict. The National Institute of Anthropology and History said at the time the statue was similar to depictions of a fertility goddess of the Huastec culture. But institute archeologists also said she may have been a member of the elite, or part of the governing class. The replica will be as much as three times the size of the 6ft (2 meter) original, which is being displayed in Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology. City authorities decided the Columbus statue should be moved to a less prominent site, and should be replaced by an Indigenous woman because they had been underrepresented. The aesthetics of the replica will be a stark change from the Columbus statue. The Young Woman of Amajac is pre-Hispanic in style with an open-eyed stare because the colored stones that were probably originally inserted in her eye sockets have been lost. While there have been other sculptures of Indigenous people on the city’s Reforma boulevard, they were usually made in a neo-classical style that matched the ornate base of the former Columbus statue, the urns and other sculptures on the boulevard. The Young Woman of Amajac will be placed atop the original neo-classical base. The Columbus statue was removed last year supposedly for restoration, shortly before 12 October, which those in the US know as Columbus Day but Mexicans call Día de la Raza, or Day of the Race – the anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in 1492. Protesters frequently targeted the Columbus statue for graffiti protesting against the brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples. Plans to replace the Columbus statue provoked controversy among critics of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Claudia Sheinbaum, the mayor of Mexico City, who saw it as an attempt to rewrite Spain out of the country’s history and diminish the Spanish role in Mexico’s founding and culture. “The idea of Mexico being the product of a combination of Spanish culture with Indigenous culture, among younger historians, is coming to an end,” said Ilán Semo, historian at the Iberoamerican University. The history now being written, Semo said, “sees the Spanish as the origin of racism [in Mexico]”. The Columbus statue controversy arrived as the country marked the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) to the Spanish. Sheinbaum has often spoken this year of “500 years of Indigenous resistance” and proposed replacing Columbus with an image of an Indigenous woman. But renditions of a proposed replacement statue drew widespread derision: artist Pedro Reyes said the sculpture was inspired by Olmec statuary, but the work was described as resembling a science-fiction alien. Sheinbaum cancelled the sculpture and tasked the city’s monument and public artworks committee with choosing an alternative. She described replacing Columbus as the “decolonisation of Paseo de la Reforma”, the capital’s most emblematic boulevard. On Tuesday, the head of the anthropology institute, Diego Prieto Hernández, acknowledged that continued threats to the Columbus statue were the reason behind the decision to move it to a quieter park in an upscale neighborhood where protests are rare. “This was based, not on any ideological judgement of the [Columbus] character, but rather because of a need to conserve the sculptural group, which, if it had been left in place, would have been the target of threats and protests,” Prieto Hernández said.